A: My anti-spam defence has intercepted your email before I ever saw it. Perhaps there was something about it that made it look like spam, or perhaps your ISP is one that I seem to get a lot of spam from. A list of ISP's whose mail is currently being bounced because of a history of spam bearing their addresses is given on this page.
A: I don't have time. I was sampling incoming spam for three months in order to sort out what was real mail from e-junk. Off-the-shelf solutions are able to filter out better than 90% of incoming spam; my solution kills about 99.5%, so it's twenty times better, but obviously such accuracy takes time. Here is a page to give you some tips about how to construct a similar anti-spam defence.
A: Well, apart from the fact that I don't believe most spammers ever read stuff like this at individual web sites, it doesn't worry me in the least. Either the spammers (or their mass-mailing program) will interpret the bounce message as a sign that their harvested email list is out of date, in which case they'll stop (and yes, a sizeable proportion of the most frequent offenders have stopped sending me spam since I started bouncing it) or else they'll know I'm here and can then choose whether they're going to save their bandwidth by removing me from their list, or continue to use it up by sending things out that are never going to reach me. If they want to waste their own resources, than that's absolutely fine by me.
or do you want to marry a nice Russian/Chinese/Thai/Burmese lady?
or do you want to know how I made $555,000 in six weeks, and you can too?
or you may be surprised to receive this urgent communication from me, because you don't know me personally,
but I am a relative of some infamous and cruel dictator who stole millions of the relevant currency units from his people
or I am a relative of some wealthy farmer who has been killed in civil unrest
or I am an accountant for a company that has over-invoiced its suppliers
or I work for a bank and I have discovered an account of a dead person (with no relatives) with a lot of money in it
or I am a civil servant and I have access to a forgotten treasury account
and, don't tell anyone, but I have US$21.5 million and a box of diamonds, but I need your help to move it - you can keep 10% - will you help me?
A: No. Get an honest job.
A: I'm positive. Get an honest job.
A: I didn't enter that lottery. And although your message is worded completely differently from standard "419" scams, I'm pretty sure that's your game. You're really not trying very hard to get an honest job, are you?
A: Why? I never clicked anything to subscribe. I'm beginning to believe you don't actually understand the words "honest" and "job".
