Spam's effect on overall email utility

>I'm curious, how much
>has spam in general affected the way you look at email?
>
>I'm asking because I work in support at an ISP, and our support
>addresses are pretty much deluged by spam.

I'm in a near-identical business, but we have tackled the situation
differently.

>Our admins won't filter
>because they're afraid of filtering customer email into the bit
>bucket, but customer email is often buried by the volume of spam
>coming in! And unfortunately, with Outlook being the email client of
>choice at work (choice, ha!), client side spam-filtering is
>lackluster at best. Customer emails are missed anyway, lost in
>hundreds of spam messages.

We stopped using email as a support mechanism a while ago (about
2000) mostly because it doesn't scale well/handle spam volume, and
unless gatewayed into a trouble ticket system, can lead to issues
being dropped or lost.

We invested in a web-based ticketing and tracking system (RightNow)
in 2000 and really liked it. However in 2002 RightNow jacked their
price 3x, dropped our (server) platform of choice (the FreeBSD) and
moved their customers to their own hosted solution. Given we are in
the hosting biz, having a critical bit of our own infrastructure
hosted elsewhere was not appealing to us.

Additionally RightNow mostly used email to gateway into the system,
and spam volume was growing to the point of annoyance at that time.

We limped along for about 9 months on just email again while we
looked for an alternative. It served to drive home for us how poorly
email works as the primary support mechanism in an organization our
size. At MacWorld Expo I saw a trouble ticket system that was written
by one of our past clients (Macsdesign Studio)
<http://www.webhelpdesk.com>, spoke at length with the author, and
tried the demo. My staff loved it, and a little while later we bought
it.

It took a while for our clients to adjust to using a web-based
support system, but the benefits soon outweighed the drawbacks. We
get things done in a timely fashion, as the system provides a
prioritized list of "to do"s for the support staff. Client retension
is up. Web Help Desk also uses Apple technology throughout, running
on OS X Server, and WebObjects.

We still maintain some public email addresses, such as "support",
"NOC", "abuse" etc, but we filter those heavily via Postini
<http://www.postini.com> and server <http://www.communigatepro.com>
and client-side (spam-assasin and Eudora) filters. These addresses
have all been in public "whois" databases for our full *decade* of
operation, so they get literally DELUGED with spam. For example
"abuseforest.net" (Ironic isn't it?) probably receives well over
2000 spams per-day. Somwhere in that few thousand are one or two
messages we SHOULD get. The only way we can is to filter... heavily.

We *still* have customers that email "supportforest.net"... usually
ones that have been with us for a LONG time who do not contact us
frequently enough to have learned to use the Web Help Desk, or are
just stuck in an old habit. =) We read that account as an IMAP box,
and create tickets based on what comes in. Thankfully the spam
filtering catches the majority of the garbage, and what is left is
easy enough to filter through.

If, for some reason somebody can't fill out a trouble ticket, and a
legitimate email gets blocked along the way, there is always the
fall-back of the telephone. I have found that when somebody *really*
needs to get in touch, they will not rely solely on email.

--

Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
_________________________________________________________________
digital.forest Phone: +1-877-720-0483, x2001
where Internet solutions grow Int'l: +1-425-483-0483
19515 North Creek Parkway Fax: +1-425-482-6871
Suite 208 http://www.forest.net
Bothell, WA 98011 email: cgforest.net

At 7:25 AM -0700 2004/04/29, macnutmacnuthome.com wrote:
>Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
>email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

        Email has always been "unreliable" in that you were not guaranteed
that it would get through so you wouldn't trust it with legal documents or
stuff like that.

        With that said however, until the last few months, I always viewed
it as reliable enough that I would prefer it over voice messages on phone
systems or other things like that. Now though, there is so much dreck out
there, and so much "real" email being caught by filters, that the
reliablity of email is so low that it is starting to become less useful. I
now follow up important email messages with phone calls: "Did you get my
email?", which almost makes the email format pointless...

Spam is annoying but that is all, so far. Mail is reasonably trained.

If it ever gets too much I'll change my address again.

George

On 29 Apr 2004, at 08:25, macnutmacnuthome.com wrote:
> Everyone is talking about the spam filters in Eudora and how useful
> they may be, among other things about 6.1. But I'm curious, how much
> has spam in general affected the way you look at email?

It's made getting emails from new contacts problematic. Often, emails
from people I've not received email from get filtered into my junk
folder.

> At home, the volume of spam is growing as well, especially to the
> addresses I've put on my website.

I use SpamAssassin and delete anything that hits a score over 9.0, and
the 5.0-8.99 emails I look through very rarely.

> Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
> email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

Not to that extent, but it's certainly a problem. Fortunately I am in
a position that most of the spam I never see.

> Everyone is talking about the spam filters in Eudora and how useful
> they may be, among other things about 6.1. But I'm curious, how much
> has spam in general affected the way you look at email?

From what I've read, volume of spam received still varies quite a lot from
country to country, and New Zealand is thankfully at the lower end. As
such, few people I know (here) have spam reaching 1 f their total mail, so
it's not a problem at all. Even those that are up with the average Internet
user (20-50-epending on who you believe) have installed a decent filter
(i.e. one without false positives) which gets rid of almost everything.

Those that are on slow dial-up connections (particularly rural areas where
the phone line isn't that great) notice that it takes more time to download
mail than it once did, but then computers always seem slower than they once
were ;)

[...]
> And unfortunately, with Outlook being the email client of
> choice at work (choice, ha!), client side spam-filtering is
> lackluster at best.

This is a strange and inaccurate comment. Think what you like about Outlook
or Microsoft, Outlook is extremely widely used and there are plenty of
client-side anti-spam solutions available for it as a result. POPFile and
SpamBayes are two free (open-source) options that spring to mind, but there
are others. In addition, with each version of Outlook (like Eudora, Mail,
...) the built-in filtering gets better (and Microsoft have the massive
advantage of data from millions of Hotmail users). Outlook 2003, for
example, is miles ahead of Outlook 2002.

<http://popfile.sf.net>
<http://spambayes.org>

[Disclaimers: (1) I work on SpamBayes. (2) POPFile doesn't include an
Outlook plug-in, but there's a link to one that uses POPFile and many people
use it.]

[And for people who have to use Outlook or Outlook Express, I'd also encourage you to take a look at the $30 Qurb, an anti-spam program written in part by my brother-in-law, Linus Upson, who also was one of the co-founders of AvantGo many years. It's a very good program for many situations from what I've seen. -Adam]

<http://www.qurb.com/>

> It's not as if
> there aren't other alternatives, like Web forums and Instant
> Messaging...

This is an extremely temporary solution, of course. IM spam is already
rapidly growing (and is more annoying, IMO). Web forum spam doesn't seem
like a difficult task.

Spam is a problem, sure, and it does degrade the value of email as a
communication medium. IMO there's a long, long, way to go before the values
drops below the point where (the majority of) people will use it.

=Tony Meyer

At 7:25 AM -0700 4/29/04, macnutmacnuthome.com wrote:
>Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
>email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

I don't think you are overreacting at all. I also think email is too
valuable a tool to just throw out the window with the bath water and
let the spammers win.

I use SpamSieve and that has helped cut down my spam greatly ---
even better than Eudora's built-in Junk Mail filters.

I agree it can get annoying having to look for valid mail in a spam
box but overall Spam Sieve is pretty good.

--
Stevestr | San Diego, California, USA, 92130-2122
E: stevestrstevestr.org | 12 Miles NW of Miramar USMC Air Station
W: <http://www.stevestr.org> | "Oohrah! Go Devil Dawgs!"

>Everyone is talking about the spam filters in Eudora and how useful
>they may be, among other things about 6.1. But I'm curious, how much
>has spam in general affected the way you look at email?

I feel a bit on the lucky side, because most of the mail I want to receive is in German. Certain advances in the offerings of my email provider as well as in Eudora just came in time to save me hours each week. About 25 f my mail contains a virus (or similar stuff) and is blocked by my provider for a moderate fee. Another 50*re SPAM which are detected by Eudora with 98*ccuracy. But those 2/alse positives or negatives are still some 20...40 mails a week and I still have to check the lower rankings of my Junk folder... :-(

>Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
>email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

Email is still a unique form of communication, although not always used appropriately (I guess everyone watched themselves in a situation where a simple phone call would have been easier than exchanging short emails to and fro...), and "pull" methods like web forums mostly have an email notification option.

I think we are currently witnessing a struggle between the good and the bad. I am convinced that the good will win, thanks to better legislation and law enforcement as well as more and more people becoming annoyed as well as all the witty brains fighting for us good users and developing even better methods of filtering and blocking spam.

- Michael
--
________________________________________________________________
Michael Müller-Hillebrand, Dipl.-Ing. <http://cap-studio.de/>
    FrameMaker, FrameScript, XML/XSL,... Publishing-Lösungen

I had to set up a university committee involving numerous students
recently. Adding them to the committee's list was frustrating because
1) they mostly don't keep their forwarding up to date in the
university's database as they switch e-mail providers, 2) some of
them use white-list only filters to keep out spam and forget to add
lists they're supposed to get, and 3) many filter or ignore all
attachments, and we had to send some large formatted documents out to
prepare for the first meeting. Hardly any of the students had
received theirs. This is just a sample.

The volume of my spam continues to grow--to around 300 a day, if you
count the irritating feedback from other people's filters responding
to spam with my address spoofed in the "from" field. I swear that
that number of real mails has dropped significantly in the past year
or so. People are indeed getting fed up with having to shout above
the noise.
--
Paul Brians
Professor of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2050
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/

On Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 10:25 AM, macnutmacnuthome.com wrote:

> Everyone is talking about the spam filters in Eudora and how useful
> they may be, among other things about 6.1. But I'm curious, how much
> has spam in general affected the way you look at email?

It's greatly affected the way I look at and use e-mail, as well as the
way I'm designing sites, as well as the way the ISPs I deal with handle
mail.

After using one convenient addy for everything for years, I also
changed my strategy about 3 years ago when I changed ISPs when I
switched to broadband. I was overwhelmed by hundreds of spam messages a
day that were sneaking past Earthlink's rather strict filters. Going
through my inbox had gone from being a pleasant task to something akin
to poking through a festering garbage can - and the spam I was
inundated with at work had gotten even worse.

I just use this address for personal mail, TidBITS and another list I
belong to. I have addresses set up for business, where I also also
receive mail from a list that my ISP's filters block.

>
> I'm asking because I work in support at an ISP, and our support
> addresses are pretty much deluged by spam. Our admins won't filter
> because they're afraid of filtering customer email into the bit
> bucket, but customer email is often buried by the volume of spam
> coming in!

At previous jobs and with every client I've worked with, anything coded
in HTML with an "" or a "mailto" link is sure to result in an unending
deluge of spam. The best way to eliminate spam is to remove this from
the site - get them out of all the code, including the alt and hidden
tags.

Replace all mail links with a link to a CGI/Perl form (not something
like cgiemail, which requires an "a" forwarding address in the hidden
code, and is therefore vunerable, or formmail, which has a history of
security problems.) I haven't worked with PHP, but I think it's good
for developing secure forms as well.

> And unfortunately, with Outlook being the email client of
> choice at work (choice, ha!), client side spam-filtering is
> lackluster at best. Customer emails are missed anyway, lost in
> hundreds of spam messages.

In addition to alienating customers because of missed messages, your
company is probably spending a lot of money for the support people to
sift through spam, and it's also probably resulting in slower response
rates to legitimate requests. It's also annoying to you and your
colleagues to have to deal with spam and the often offensive content of
the messages, and it's probably draining bandwidth as well as employee
productivity.

Because just about every e-mail user has negative feelings about spam,
and people prefer to deal with companies that are helping them to
remove as much spam from their in boxes, it would probably be good
strategy for your company to let people know that they are employing
filters for outgoing as well as incoming mail, and position themselves
as a company that protects privacy.

>
> At home, the volume of spam is growing as well, especially to the
> addresses I've put on my website. I sometimes think that if the
> volume of spam at home grows to the levels it has at work, I may just
> stop using email altogether out of sheer frustration. It's not as if
> there aren't other alternatives, like Web forums and Instant
> Messaging...

Since your addy is already snagged by spammers, in addition to changing
your current e-mail addresses and removing all live and mailto
references and links, it would be a good idea to change the server
configuration so that incorrectly addressed mail is no longer forwarded
to you. All misconfigured addresses should bounce, at least for the
time being.

A CGI will be a good idea here too. You can also create a gif with a
"Spam safe e-mail address" (like "yourname at yoursite.com") - and let
people know in the gif that a mail link will not automatically open and
they cannot cut and paste it into their message and will have to type
it in manually. Alternate tags for this gif should not include an ""
symbol.

>
> Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
> email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

I think I said it here before - spam is killing the killer app.

Marilyn

Hello,

I think the problem is that individuals doesn't take antispam fight seriously.

As an individual, there is tow approach for spam:

1- cry
2- fight

I prefer the second one.

There are solutions that can insure 0 zero per cent) spam whatever
amount of mail (and therefore of spam) you receive.

I'm on the internet since the very early hours of the public internet
at a time where the spam was just a funny new thing so like all other
guys in this situation I didn't protect my email at that time and my
mail adresses are on all listings of all blue pills vendors...

I use Eudora with the spam filter, but I use it with the free POPFile.

I receive around 1000/1200 messages by day (I'm journalist so I'm
subscriber of a lot of mailing lists in the fields I cover) among
these 1000 messages a day, around 60/70*re spam.

0 spam arrives in my regular mailboxes.

The only little hassle that comes from spam is that from time to time
I have to browse thought the titles of my spam mailbox to ensure no
regular mail has been falsely classified as spam (this never occurs
but I'm a little bit paranoiac).

Spam is not MY problem it's my ISP problem (because he carries spam,
has a larger bandwidth requirement and so on..)
The day where every single individual will be equipped with a machine
insuring 0 pam goes its way to the regular mailboxes, spam will be
the ISP only problem and they probably will have to react.

I must precise I use a very fast DSL line and I pay a fixed price for
it so the bandwidth collecting spam is not a problem for me (again
it's my ISP problem)

My two cents.

Luc

At 7:25 am -0700 29/4/04, macnutmacnuthome.com wrote:
>Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
>email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

Filtering is the only way to cope with spam, IMO. I currently rely on
the built-in filters in Eudora 6.1, since my email addresses
currently receive around 200 spams per day.

If you absolutely can't have a false positive*, the best bet is
Brightmail - this only filters spam that has arrived at one of its
many spamtrap addresses. My ISP introduced Brightmail (optionally)
after many years of resisting spam filters because of the problem of
false positives.

Paul

*Brightmail don't claim a zero rate, but they do claim an extremely
low false positive rate.
--
Paul Durrant, Durrant Software Limited, Reg.Co.No.: 2612332
Custom XTensions for QuarkXPress since 1991
82 Earlham Road, Norwich, Norfolk, NR2 3HA.
<http://www.durrant.co.uk/>

On Apr 30, 2004, at 1:54 PM, Paul Durrant wrote:

> If you absolutely can't have a false positive*, the best bet is
> Brightmail

Alternately, set up a useful system whereby the false positive still
gets to you.

Since I use Fastmail, I have a very robust spam scoring program
(spamassassin, if I remember correctly) plus an excellent mail
filtering program (sieve) which I can customize to my heart's content.
All mailing lists, messages from my bank, and everyone in my address
book gets whitelisted. That takes care of nearly all of the false
positives I spend time worrying about.

For the remainder, I'm a fierce anti-spammer. I bounce email with
fairly low scores (8+) and knock even lower scores (2.5) into a Spam
folder for later perusal and purging. Since most all of my mail gets
filed before its tested for spaminess, I can afford to be this
draconian.

On those few mails which get bounced outright which are actually mails
I want, they get a response email informing them that they spammed me
and their given a mailing address that will automatically bypass the
spam filters. This sort of challenge response only on select messages
works very well. I have yet to have to change that spam-bypassing
address because of overuse. (In fact, it's only been used once, the
spam filters are quite good.)

Without the spam filters, I would have given up on email or changed my
address about a zillion times. I get around 100 spam messages per day,
out of a mail volume of about half of that. When 2/3 of my email is
spam, that's a sign that something's seriously wrong.

Now if I could just build a spam filter for my post office box...

On 30 Apr 2004, at 13:54, Luc Saint-Elie wrote:
> There are solutions that can insure 0 zero per cent) spam whatever
> amount of mail (and therefore of spam) you receive.

No there are not. Well, that's not quite right. The is no solution
that provides 100*ccuracy in terms of BOTH spam and non-spam. If
your anti-spam tactics are too sctrict (strict enough to let in _ZERO_
spam, then you _will_ lose legitimate mail.

There is no FUSSP (FInal Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem). It
doesn't exist.

> I receive around 1000/1200 messages by day (I'm journalist so I'm
> subscriber of a lot of mailing lists in the fields I cover) among
> these 1000 messages a day, around 60/70*re spam.
>
> 0 spam arrives in my regular mailboxes.

I find that extremely hard to believe. I get very little spam into my
incoming mail, but I still get some. New and different methods every
few days evade SA, and that's even with dropping mail at the server
that comes from non-existent domains.

And I do occasionally get real mail that gets tagged as spam. Not very
often, and usually it is "spam looking" like web verification emails,
password reminders, invoices, reciepts, &c.

Now, on this account, that is devoted simply to mailing list I get
almost no spam. Any mail that is not addressed to a known list gets
extra scrutiny on this account, but I've decide to live with the
occasional mislaid off-list reply in exchange for living spam-free on
this account. But the account I use for purchases online still gets
quite a lot of spam because my filters cannot be as strict.

[OK, let's not devolve into a discussion of how effective tools are. It's safe to say that nothing can be 100 percent effective for everyone. -Adam]

Michael MXller-Hillebrand wrote:

>Email is still a unique form of communication, although not always used appropriately (I guess everyone watched themselves in a situation where a simple phone call would have been easier than exchanging short emails to and fro...)
>
I've found very few situations where a short phone call is easier or
preferable to a short e-mail (although I've seen a few complex
situations where a long phone call is preferab to a really long e-mail).

With a phone call, I have to dial the phone, wait for the answer, oops
callee isn't in, leave voice mail. Wait for callee to check voice
mail, call me back, oops I'm not in, leave me voice mail. With e-mail
users don't have to be present continuously for a conversation to take
place. This is still a huge advantage to me (and one of the reasons I'm
not fond of IM either.)

As far as support goes, as an end-user I like e-mail support. Web forms
are OK, but it can be difficult or impossible to attach screen shots of
error messages (although getting a 3MB attachment of an error message is
annoying), also much information has to be entered by hand that is
automatically added for me in a mail message (either via signatures or
by the envelope information).

As a tech support person I can certainly empathize, fortunately our
support e-mail address hasn't yet become inundated with spam, and we're
90 nternal corporate support so filtering external mail to the mail
box is easily done. Like Chuck Goolsbee we're starting to run into
scaling issues with initial support contact/ticket creation from e-mail,
although I'm hoping we can get around it with better tools in our e-mail
app to create tickets from incoming mail (combined with web ticket
creation for users that will use that.)

Kevin

Victor Daniel makes an excellent point about spam interfering with
email collection when one travels. Without SpamSieve installed on an
Internet cafe computer I'm back to picking through my messages one by
one looking for the rare valid messages. Sometimes I can use telnet
to use Pine, which is at least fairly speedy and easy to use. But
mostly I'm forced to use Web-based e-mail clients, which are
uniformly sluggish and maddening to use when there's a preponderance
of spam in the inbox.

Our university is experimenting with Barracuda filtering at the
mail-server level, and so far it seems to catch 60-80 f the
incoming spam. In two weeks so far I've only found two false
positives.

Those of us whose mail consists largely of wanted messages from
strangers responding to our Web sites can't solve our problems by
using whitelists or removing our addresses from our Web pages.
--
Paul Brians
Professor of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-2050
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/

On 30/4/2004 2:25 AM, "macnutmacnuthome.com" <macnutmacnuthome.com> spake
thus:

> Does anyone else feel this way, as if spam may drive them to abandon
> email as a form of communication? Or am I just overreacting?

As Tony Meyer mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the spam volumes in New
Zealand don't seem that bad yet, although I am getting in the tens of
messages per day now and expect that to go up.

I've just been bitten by a side-effect of the spam problem. Our division
runs IHateSpam on the Exchange server (which I haven't heard particularly
good things about, but that's not my problem). When they put it in, they
said that if individual users didn't want it, it could be turned off. I
didn't (I run my own filters), so requested it be turned off, and it was.
End of story, right?

Nope. A few months later, and I'm having problems with people sending me
emails that never arrive. It turns out that the IT folks had to reinstall
IHateSpam a couple of times and consequently my personal spam box got
switched on again. Of course, I _knew_ that it was turned off, so I never
bothered checking the spam box on the server. When I finally did look in
there a couple of weeks ago, I discovered 911 messages (a somewhat
appropriate number :), of which maybe 50 were legitimate. No wonder my
students were getting annoyed with me :)

A misconfigured spam filter can cause complete chaos.

--
=Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
mailto:nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz

At 7:48 AM -0700 2004/05/03, LuKreme wrote:
>On 30 Apr 2004, at 13:54, Luc Saint-Elie wrote:
>> There are solutions that can insure 0 zero per cent) spam whatever
>> amount of mail (and therefore of spam) you receive.
>
>No there are not. Well, that's not quite right. The is no solution
>that provides 100*ccuracy in terms of BOTH spam and non-spam. If
>your anti-spam tactics are too sctrict (strict enough to let in _ZERO_
>spam, then you _will_ lose legitimate mail.

        And this is only when looking at the RECIEVING part of the
equation. What about sending? These days it is sometimes challenging to get
your own messages sent to your recipients. Messages can be silently dropped
by ISP and personal filters, and even when bounced the bounce messages
often are of little use since telling you exactly why it bounced could just
provider spammers with the information needed to bypas the filters.

        I wanted to send my sister some information about a loan a while
back. Everything kept bouncing until I changed "loan" in the subject line
with "1oan" (a numeral "one" rather than a letter "el") - so my subject
line in some sense ended up looking even more spammy in my mind. Had her
ISP been even more sophisitcated, I would have had to use pig-latin or
somthing silly like that (ROT-13)?

At 7:14 AM -0700 5/5/04, Johann Beda wrote:
> And this is only when looking at the RECIEVING part of the
>equation. What about sending? These days it is sometimes challenging to get
>your own messages sent to your recipients. Messages can be silently dropped
>by ISP and personal filters, and even when bounced the bounce messages
>often are of little use since telling you exactly why it bounced could just
>provider spammers with the information needed to bypas the filters.

If you even see the bounce messages. My email address gets forged so
often that my Bayesian spam filter treats all bounce messages as
spam. Since bounce messages all look the same, the only way I'll see
a legitimate bounce message is if I notice a bounce message
immediately after I send something out. Bounce messages and vacation
programs have become almost useless because of spam.

--
Paul Schinder
schinderpobox.com

This has been said before:

In the very early days of amateur radio people exchange ideas freely
around the globe. It was a wonderful experience for all of them.

Within a few years it all collapsed and licensing was brought in, not
virii but too much traffic conflicting, perhaps. The perfectly free
transmission of information and ideas became limited to the few who
studied for the difficult license. Restrictions about what could be
discussed were imposed.

Broadcasting ideas and news went to commercial, carefully controlled
and censored radio.

We may be seeing something parallel happening and should think over who
it is we want to be in control of the situation as it develops...

George Wade

on 5/6/04 12:37 pm, Paul Schinder at schinderpobox.com wrote:

> My email address gets forged so
> often that my Bayesian spam filter treats all bounce messages as
> spam. Since bounce messages all look the same, the only way I'll see
> a legitimate bounce message is if I notice a bounce message
> immediately after I send something out. Bounce messages and vacation
> programs have become almost useless because of spam.

I find that very interesting. My Bayesian filter (POPFile) has learned the
difference between a legitimate bounce and a spam bounce, and filters
accordingly. It may have to do with the fact that I use POPFile to filter on
more categories than just spam, so it recognizes the content of the bounced
message I sent (usually quoted in the bounce) as belonging to a legitimate
category, whereas the quoted content of a spam bounce is still spam.

Mark D. McKean
qpandaquantumpanda.com