I've used Mailwasher for years - always Blacklisting and Bouncing spam.

No biggie here, but I'm just curious:

In the past week all of the sudden I'm getting a bazillion emails saying my mail has been returned.

Clearly they are one of two things - both of which would be a new trend.
1. Returned mail from addresses that Mailwasher tried to bounce to
or
2. Spoofs to begin with just to see if it gets returned.

Anyone else seeing this lately?

Any thoughts on which of the above two it is?
Any thoughts as to whether this is some sort of new fiching technique?

NeedKarma

I haven't experienced it but I had seen elsewhere as your #2 point: spoofs getting bounced back. They usually die down after a short while since the spammer does one big run per spoofed email address.

If it continues then I'm not sure what it could be. Turning off Mailwasher for a test period is certainly something I would do. Doesn't your ISP have a good spam filtering software at the server level?

RickJ

I use RoadRunner, so truth is, I bet they do have something...I've just never checked it out before since Mailwasher does such a wonderful job.

...and there is a little thrill involved in bouncing spam back to spammers

NeedKarma

That may have worked in the old days but now pretty much all the replyto addresses are spoofed/fake. For the 419 scams and the fake lottery ones I look for the contact email provided in the body of the spam and forward the mail to abuse @ "ISP Name" and tell then to shut down their drop box. Often I get a reply back that says that the subscriber has breached his TOS. Hehe. Yes, I also take some pleasure in shutting them down.