Spam and bounces - how do you handle it?

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Friday 09 February 2007 11:43 am, Ben Scott wrote:
>   Backscatter may be causing you to send very large amounts of bogus
> mail send to people who have nothing to do with you.  In many cases,
> backscatter is a worse problem than spam.   The fact that you do not
> mean to be causing problems does not mean you are not causing
> problems.  It's not fair, of course, but we all know how that goes.

Yeah, I know that much and that's why I'm asking because I intend to do 
something about it.  But as I said, a lot of our backscatter is bounce 
traffic originating from legitimate addresses.  The bounce error is important 
as it will tell a real person why their message cannot be posted or their 
request cannot be handled for one reason or another and it's used in this 
capacity very often.  But every time one of those addresses is hit by a 
falsified sender, the bounce message goes to that falsified sender.

One idea I had was to essentially turn up the sensitivity on spam filtering 
for bounces.  The thresholds are more relaxed for incoming mail, because I 
tend to prefer people receive some spam that lose real messages.  I've 
considered having a check on outgoing bounce messages that would lower those 
thresholds, so that perhaps some legitimate bounce traffic would get lost, 
but more backscatter would get dropped.  While I think this might be 
effective, it would also still be a very grey area and difficult to keep tabs 
on.

Anyone gotten any more creative solutions in place?
-N