If only spammers would use such a tool, to handle bounces. Unfortunately, only a few bother. However, my experience seems to indicate that a very, very small amount of spammers actually do remove addresses of bounced email from their lists.

I use Bouncer for Entourage to automatically bounce all of the spam that SpamSieve finds, once an hour. I have set up special "Postmaster" email accounts, for Bouncer to use, so the bounced email comes from postmaster@somedomain.com, just like real bounces.

When I began using Bouncer, I saw about a 10% drop in quarantined email, over about 3 months. Then, my spam stabilized and slowly began to climb, as before. When I was traveling for several months, I was using a costly wireless connection and turned off Bouncer for that time. After several months, my spam had begun to grow in number, somewhat faster. Upon returning home and turning Bouncer back on, I noticed the same 10% drop, over about 3 months, that I had seen previously.

This leads me to believe that at least a very few spammers do use a tool like Bounce Handler. In a perfect world, every spammer would use something like Bounce Handler... Correct that... In a perfect world, spammers would be charged with a felony and forced to pay the costs that identifying and deleting all of their garbage, costs their victims.

Until we get such legislation in place, all that we can do is to hope that more spammers will use tools like Bounce Handler and lobby software developers to implement "Spam Filters That Fight Back". That's a spam filter that repeatedly pings (up to 20 times) the web sites referred to in spam and sends repeated nonsense email (up to 20 emails) to the email addresses referred to in spam. If only a small percentage of email users were to use such a product, the spammers sites would crash from the load, without it being able to be classed a DDOS attack. After all, only 20 hits from one computer does not constitute a denial of service. But a million computers doing the same thing would bring the spammers servers to their knees. Then consider that even if some slick lawyer were to come up with a way to class it as a DDOS attack, what jury would convict a user, for helping to crash a spammer's servers? Think about it...

I hope that spammers, who use Macs, will download and use Bounce Handler. But, since they don't respond to unsubscribe requests, either, I don't have much hope of that happening. After all, spammers are among the lowest form of life on the planet - just below lawyers and only ever so slightly above most politicians.