My e-mail account has recently been flooded with wave after wave of spam, and while I was in the process of deleting it all and reporting as spam, I got an idea.

Usually the e-mail addresses of the spam come as a long string of seemingly random numbers and letters @somecompany.com, but recently they have come as simple adresses at even netscape.com, but I have noticed that even then when an e-mail is written in reply, they bounce back (I expected that, but this is where my idea comes in). I am not familiar with how most spam filters work, but I figure it does not hurt to reflect on this idea and think about it.

If it never fails that replies to spam bounce back, would it be possible to somehow ping the address a few minutes after receiving to check if the address exists anymore, then if it returns a big "NO" delete the e-mail :)? Seems like something that could be done with Perl. Use mechanize to log into my account, then do all of the dirty work of deleting my spam.

What are your thoughts (or is this already done :)?

In reply to Just Another Discussion of Spam by CloneArmyCommander

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