The title says it all. The practice of programming spam filters in POP servers to take email that is classified as junk spam and to "return" it back to the supposed sending email address is incredibly stupid.

Have you ever gotten junk emails "returned" to you that you never sent in the first place? I get them all the time. My web sites have email contact addresses that get used in spammer emailings. The spammers do not use my pop server. They use other pop servers and just put one of my email addresses as a return address. Actually, they usually do not even do that. They use the @futurepundit.com domain and put some string in front of that domain to create what looks like an email address. Then they send out spam with a fake return address that uses a known legal registered domain.

Oh the irony. The spam filter POP servers that bounce the spammer emails are themselves generating spam by bouncing the spam messages back to email addresses that do not exist. My pop server routes those spams to my default email address and I get dozens or even hundreds of bounced emails on some days.

POP server administrators and spam filtering software developers should not configure filtering software to bounce spam. They should just delete it and stop contributing to the problem.