i hate spam folders

Fucking bounce it? Fucking hell, no! I'd guesstimate that 107.5% of all spam "From:" addresses is forged, so those bounces would end up at non-existant mailboxes or with innocent people such as my fucking self. For fuck's sake, just drop it, don't bounce it! (Sung to Leon Haywood's classic.)

Also, what gives with the disappearing text whenever I focus this box? I have to do a Ctrl+Z to get my text back! Also also, I had to disable JavaScript just to post this comment, because clicking the "Preview" button told me I had not filled in a name.

Bouncing spam is the most retarded thing any mail server can do since, as Jan pointed out, most From addresses in spam are forged. Not to mention the fact that if every mail server bounced spam, worldwide email traffic would double. Even worse, the bounced messages would often be caught by spam filters themselves and would get re-bounced, and you'd quickly have a very messy situation.

you’re right, by bouncing i meant reject at smtp delivery time. post-delivery bouncing is pretty useless.

i’ve fixed the comment form.

How would that solve your problem? Instead of being stored in a spam folder, your "really important emails" would just go away forever and you'd never know.

no, the sender would get the bounce message from their local mailer. if i send someone a piece of mail that will get incorrectly routed to a spam folder, i would much rather it was rejected than it being accepted for delivery and then delivered someplace they never look.

now, if someone sends me a really important message and it gets dumped in my spam folder, nobody gets notified. if i send a really important message that gets dropped into a spam folder, nobody gets notified. if you don’t accept what you think is spam in the first place, people get notified.

Agreed absolutely! At least some spam requires a reply to know the address works. Bounce it, and they'll never know!

A much better solution IMHO.

You're not taking into account the fact that most spam analysis takes place after the conversation between the sending and receiving servers has ended. This is how many installations of SpamAssassin work.

My server, for example, uses the xbl.spamhaus.org blocklist as a real-time check and rejects connections from servers in the blocklist, but doesn't run a SpamAssassin analysis until a message is queued for delivery to a user (since some users may have custom SpamAssassin rules). By this stage, the sender has already disconnected.

so the argument is that many spamassassin installations are configured to run in a limited fashion, so i should be happy about it? no sale.

No, the argument is that "just fucking bounce it" isn't as easy as you seem to think. Be as unhappy as you want, it's not going to change anytime soon; there are a lot of good reasons why many mail servers run their spam analyses at the delivery stage rather than the connection stage.

I agree with you that rejecting connections as early as possible is the most desirable way to block spam, but it's not always simple.