On Monday, December 20, 2004, 12:26:25 PM, Nick Askew wrote:
if people here think for good reason that complaints to the ISP's of spam URL's would backfire then there is not point proceeding so I thought a discussion at this level would be a good start.
It could definitely backfire. There are ISPs (like in China, Russia, Brazil, the U.S., etc.) that apparently don't kick off spammers who host web sites on their servers. For all we know those same ISPs could be forwarding spam complaints to the spammers, and the spammer could be using the complaints simply to confirm the addresses (and successful delivery) they are sending to. This has been a likely problem for a long time with responding in any way to spam.
Once a spammer gets such a delivery, the address the spam was sent to becomes much more valuable to try to send more spam to, and to sell to other spammers since it's known to be a valid address. Spammers may not take a close look at the type of blocking and try to force the mail through in various ways.
Any kind of response that can get back to spammers can be regarded as a poor practice for some of these reasons.
Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it."