Some spam software is smart, if it gets a message back from either of: "Mail Delivery System" or "Mailer Daemon" it will remove the address from it's database. The 'good' spam programs do this to cut out loads of bounces and other responses and so keep the mail server running well.

Therefore I think there's something you can try against some persistent offenders (you often recognise spams as coming from the same company/person after a while).

Create a new mail account in your email client and give it an email address and reply-to address that doesn't exist - but keep the *right* details in there to access your mail server. Then set your name up to be "Mail Delivery System".

Now select a spam you just received and hit REPLY. But change the outgoing account to your new one.

Now set the Subject line to "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender".

Finally paste the following to the start of the email (You should recognise it as a standard delivery failure message), but replace "your.emailaddress.com" with your email address.

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of itsrecipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

your.emailaddress.com SMTP error from remote mailer after RCPT TO:<your.emailaddress.com>:

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Now... How well will this work? I dunno - but if it does work then all email clients should have a "Bounce message as undeliverable" button to make this easy.

- webchat

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