Proper Ways to Dispose of Spam?

An anonymous reader asks: "My domain name is being stolen by spammers; they forge outgoing mail using my poor innocent domain name. First, I'd like to plead with mail server administrators out there: please REJECT spam and undeliverable mail. If you reject instead of bouncing then legitimate mail senders will still know there is a problem. Second, do you have any tips for dealing with a flood of spam bounces? Exim is pitching the bounces pretty quickly, but my server is still getting overwhelmed." In the case of stolen sender addresses, SPF attempts to address this problem but has it been effective?

Comments

anyone have a domain where this DIDN'T happen?

[Subgenius]

Welcome to my hell. I've had this happen to 8 of my domains over the last couple of years, typical spam runs of 30k at a time, based on all of the 'bounce back' messages that tell me 'my' mail is spam, or worse "go F** yourself, spammer" crud. SPF might fix this, but only if it was mandatory and ALL ISPs blocked non-commercial email servers (DO NOT WANT the latter to occur).

Good Luck.

Re:SPF!

[stg]

That was the same in my case. I still get about the same number of bounces from spammers after adding SPF.
The only thing that did solve it was killing all addresses I don't use and adding filters for the most common bounces.