This is not a personal attack, please don't take it as such. That said:

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, Generic Player wrote:

Except that well over 99% of spam comes from a forged address, and more and more often, it's a real address that's forged, so you're adding to the problem. My level of bounces from messages that I never sent to nonexistant addresses is already running about 25% of my spam level. If everyone doing spam filtering started bouncing email sent to legitimate addresses, I think I'd be seeing more bounces than spam.

You either trust your filters, or you don't, it's that simple. There are rules that I trust to dev/null email. Not many, however. Most of my rules send to a spam folder that I try to go through once a day, once a week at worst.

Now, *IF* something like DHVP (dynamic HELO verification protocol) were in place, then you'd know that the machine that sent you the email is at least authorized to send for that domain, then you'd only be a nusiance to people using ISPs whos resources are being abused. Well, hotmail is one of them, they're having problems with spammers using DAV to send email with forged froms through their system. It all comes out as from someone at msn or hotmail, but it can happen.

Are you subscribed to SPAM-L or spamtools? Those are two lists where arguments like this get hashed out and shredded on a regular basis (the first moreso than the second).