Spam is a blight, I have to delete spam posts from the feedback on this blog, and I have spam control software on my email client.

At the moment I’m getting hundreds of messages bouncing back to an email account on one of my domains because evidently someone out there has or is sending spam with a reply address which isn’t their own.

Now although I accept the logic of a screening function that challenges a particular email if detected as spam, and offers the sender the opportunity to take remedial action, I’m rather annoyed at the stupidity of some returns which effectively say “your email is spam, go away”. I’d like to say to such senders that the numbers of spammers who use their own email address on SPAM is next to nil these days, and at the moment I think such people arenot very far up the stupidity scale from spammers themselves.

Some advice for mail admins – just delete the things, then I don’t receive 500 copies of the original spam message that you got from some stranger to me, and you don’t clog your outbound SMTP queue or the relays handling them downstream. And yes, I know some may be useful because there is a human at the other end, but frankly I’d rather try a couple of times and sort it out with my existing contact by telephone rather than rely on an email.