Ask Slashdot: Spoof an Email Bounce With Windows? 244
An anonymous reader writes "One cool feature I used on KMail years ago was the ability to generate a spoofed email bounce for any given message I had received, which claimed delivery failed because of an unknown recipient. While this doesn't exactly align with expected behaviour from a mail client, it was a useful way of easily getting off mailing lists (automated, or manually created by freaky acquaintances!). This is something I really miss, so I'm wondering if there are any mail clients for Windows that provide similar functionality?"
Call Microsoft support and ask them (Score:3, Insightful)
Why don't you call Microsoft support and ask them. After all, isn't this one of the things you pay for and they are supposed to provide stellar support with?
Bounce==Backscatter (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the from address is invariably forged, you do nothing with a bounce. In fact, it's worse than nothing, because you create backscatter [wikipedia.org]. I have suffered from backscatter and it is a pain - it just multiplies the spam problem. So, could I request that you just stop it!
If you actually know the person who is sending you the email then you should try a more personal approach rather than a passive aggressive bounce.
Re:huh?? (Score:3, Insightful)
I went back to the Just Works(tm) environment of Cubase + Win XP after nearly throwing my computer out the window trying to get that steaming pile of shit Jack to work with Ardour.
Re:Can't Demand Strangers Spoon-feed You (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that saying just fucking google it isn't teaching somebody to fish either. It's very quick to enter terms into a search engine if you know what the answer is, and quite a bit more difficult if you have no idea what the answer should look like.
In this case you have to figure out how to exclude the various ways of saying anti-spoof while not excluding essential links. And google often times makes it a pain in the ass to find things as any appearance of the terms anywhere in the page is by default considered a match. Even if they're not only not in the same sentence, but not even in the same paragraph. My favorite thing is when the engine finds the words in a link bar on the side of the page or as contact information at the bottom.
Re:You are wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
If I read the question correctly, he's not talking about getting off of spam lists, he's talking about getting off of legitimate mailing lists that are annoying. It's a fine distinction, but you're talking about "spam" which is things like Viagra ads and others that are not legitimate, but are instead mailed from zombie/botnet computers and the like and are really illegal. He's talking about mailing lists owned or bought by companies and used to send completely legitimate emails to prospective customers; you can get on these when you give out your email address, or when you buy things online from various companies. You might only get emails from a company you bought from, or they may sell your email address and then you'll get emails from other companies you haven't bought from. Either way, it's actually legal AFAICT, until you opt-out. The problem is the opt-out process usually isn't that easy, by design. But these emails, to my knowledge, do in fact come from the proper domain; Sears, Walmart, etc. are not going to use botnets to send their email ads.
Re:Can't have your cake and eat it too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Call Microsoft support and ask them (Score:2, Insightful)
No, I agree with him. Slashdot is a major "news" site. This isn't experts-exchange or MS support. Why the hell is "how do I..." making front page news?
Re:Usefulness (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Can't Demand Strangers Spoon-feed You (Score:2, Insightful)
Build a man a fire, you keep him warm for one night.
Set a man on fire, you keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Re:Can't Demand Strangers Spoon-feed You (Score:2, Insightful)
This kind of arrogance is why we can't have nice things. Most of the time when I find an answer to something that's stumped me the thread doesn't contain any one post or sentence that includes all of the symptoms. Mainly because the person asking for help doesn't know what the relevant information is.
Under your suggestion I wouldn't find any of those examples because it's post by post and bit by bit. Which works, assuming you use the same spelling as the poster and you don't need to combine it with other things and it's not a dependency etc. The fact that Google chooses not to parse anything out is just going to make things worse.
Then again, I really wish that Ballmer would make good on fucking killing Google because Google's effect on the search industry has been more than a little regressive.