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Comment by mkyc | Hacker News Reader

I don't check my spam folder. If it's in there, it's not delivered.

Email providers should (optionally) bounce spam, rather than sending it to a spam folder. This would eliminate the problem of false-positives, since senders would be notified. It would reduce traffic, since spammers would know the message didn't get through to any inbox, and so would focus elsewhere. Finally, it would eliminate the temptation of a spam folder for people who don't want spam, but peek 'just to make sure', and thereafter go on to support spammers.

Perhaps someone here is running an email provider, or working on such software?

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On the mail servers I run messages marked as spam get a 550 Spam error at SMTP time. The vast majority of users prefer this, as they can't be blamed for missing an email because they didn't look in their 'spam' folder, and the sender knows pretty much immediately that their message hasn't got through (in the event of a false positive).

Bounce it where? The return address is always fake and sometimes it's that of an innocent bystander.

Not if it's a false positive!

I'd 550 the spamming server sending it to me, they can take care of the bounce themselves.

The problem is that the overwhelming majority of spam has a false return address, and the technologies to verify that mail came from the server it claims aren't yet widely enough used to be reliable. The bounces create an extremely large amount of traffic for servers unrelated to the spammers.

Besides, many servers do behave in the way you specify. Before I had the sense to disable catch-all email addresses on a few domains I owned, they were all being flooded with bounced spam, much of which my spam filters didn't catch.

Blah. Everything's a mess.

The important part of what I said above is that the spam would not arrive in any inbox. The temptation (and ability) to look through spam is the current problem, and would be eliminated.

If some servers are already doing that, then they are doing the right thing - except, the message body of a spam should not be bounced. The extra traffic on the bounce is worth expending, since it is necessary to keep spam out of sight.

If they can't get their message through, they lose the incentive to send spam. That's all that matters.

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