At one time this was a great idea and I would tell everyone to do this but - times have changed.

Originally, bouncing mail back would slow the spam server, cutting down on the 72,000 junk mails per hour it can send because it would take about 3 min to handle a bounced e-mail. If everyone bounced e-mail, it would stall the spammer's servers. For this reason, they would remove you from the spam list.

Now what's happening is addresses are being spoofed, so when you bounce an e-mail, it doesn't return to it's original sender, rather to an un-suspecting third party who just happened to have their name in the "from" line.

The virus creators are taking advantage of this as well by attaching a virus to the spam and when you bounce it, you are helping with the propagation of the viruses and this makes it rather hard to find the original sender of the message. Blocking spam has also become harder because of the spoofing.

A funny thing has been happening - the viruses are becoming closely related to spam - maybe they are one in the same. After all, the last few hi-jacker programs I have seen are created from older trojans and are detected by McAfee as "possibly unwanted software" and can be deleted.

So what some people had read in the newspaper has nothing to do with what happens when you bounce mail back. It DOES NOT tell the spammer your e-mail is real because the bounce gives back a 550 error that says your address is non-existent and this is what the entire world uses so the paper was about as accurate as it always is .... only good for training the dog or to put in the bottom of the bird cage.