Spam that doesn't want to delete

I am getting a ton of spam from Rodale books (runner & health magazines apparently). It acts differently than normal spam. I can't get it to go away. I mark it as spam, forward it as an attachment to my provider, and then try to bounce it.

It will bounce, but it won't leave my junk folder. I can bounce it 50 times and it will still reappear. Same thing about deleting it. After it's in the trash it still takes multiple times to get it to delete.

What can I do?

BTW I'm on a Mac and am using Mail.

carguy123 wrote: What can I do? BTW I'm on a Mac and am using Mail.

Get a PC?

Just kidding. It was too easy to not go there - I know it's not helpful. I think there are enough Mac people here that someone may be able to answer.

gmail and use the filter then have it pop or imap to you :)

sorry I gave up on mail clients years ago... I hate that work MAKES me use one :-/ could always try mozilla...

For one, don't bounce it. Bouncing is just a waste of everyone's time, and for actual spam, you're more likely to be sending the bounceback to an innocent mailbox that the spammer just happened to use as their return address.

For two, there's nothing in email that would cause it to not delete. If you're deleting it and it's sticking around, there's something else going on. Macs aren't impervious to virii, I'd run some sort of scan and see if you've got anything.

If this isn't real spam, but an opt-in list for a (mostly) legit business, there should be an unsubscribe link. Surprisingly enough, most of 'em work

I made the misteak of unsubscribing because it looked legit. That only lead to even more of it and it's grown to many other "legit looking" businesses.

Actually bouncing has helped with a lot of other spam. That is if it bounces and looks like it's unread AND there has been no nasty little image loading to trigger the sender to know it's reached a legitimate address.

This stuff ends up looking highlighted when it's in the trash.

I have scanned for virii and found none and the spam from this one source is the only spam that acts this way.

That's not spam. It's malware (likely virus).

Use a different anti-virus. None of them catch everything.

Malware, thanx.

What do they hope to accomplish with this?

I've always deleted all spam from my trash after sending it to my provider so that it doesn't sit in the puter and do unknown things

I've never (as in note once, in my entire life) seen a spam message with a legit reply to address. Bouncing does nothing but create backscatter for the people who's addresses got harvested for use as senders.

You have a configuration problem somewhere. There aren't any viruses that make junk mail persistent in your junk folder.

Backscatter can be good since it alerts the person whose address has been harvested that they have a problem, but except for the really weird spam mails (porn) at least 50% doesn't come back as a bounce. AND bouncing has reduced the amount of Spam I receive. I believe the proof is in the pudding and will continue to bounce.

I will be picking up a different anti-virus today and see what that does.

I'm curious as to what you think bouncing the mail actually accomplishes. No spammer monitors the reply to addresses, and since there's no cost involved in sending mail from zombie machines there's really no reason to ever remove an address from a list even if you know it's bad. Also, what would you do if someone else is using your email address in a reply to field in spam? Contact the police?

I still manage several exchange servers, and I'd say on average the mail they handle is 98-99% spam. At one of my accounts the exchange server handles about 10,000 messages per day. Of those 10,000 about 1,000 are addressed to an actual email user, the rest are just crap like OWEOMNGRsdffOSDYEHd012348@something.com and get immediately discarded. Usually about 150 or so actual legit emails get routed through to users. I had to stop sending stuff like bounces and DNRs because it was seriously degrading the performance of my servers.

As someone who's studied this phenomenon at length, I can safely say there's not much you can do other than filter it well. I'm not trying to be mr-smarty-pants here, it's just that I've spend the last decade or so trying to figure out a way to make it stop and NOTHING works. I think you bounce success probably coincides with something un-related your ISP is doing.