First, there was spam. Dozens of mails every day trying to sell Viagra and whatever to everyone. Then there were viruses. Worms that spread rapidly and were coming in hundreds every day. Both are plagues, and both have to be dealt with.

Now what many good people did was to implement both spam and virus filters. That's a good and a nice thing, and if they were using both and both in a responsible manner, everything would be fine.

But in fact, my inbox is now fuller than it was when just spam and viruses existed. And I'm sure you can guess why: half of the incoming mails are "Your mail has been recejected because it contains a virus" or "... because it has been classified as spam". And why is that? Most of you know the tricks of the current mail worms: they spoof the sender address. And anti-virus programms do detect them, so they should know that the sender of these mails is not a correct one, but one the virus gathered from the address book or browser cache of the infected person. But instead of deleting this mail, the antivirus gateway will mail a "Your mail has been deleted because of a virus" back to the supposed-against-better-knowledge sender.

Now those "blocked because of..." mails are nearly as ugly as every other mail. People who are saving themselves against spam and viruses are doing this on the cost of those who don't use such protection by causing much more unnecessary traffic that can be called spam as well.

Therefore I call to everyone using spam- and virus-filters: call your administrator and the producer of your filter and ask them to stop sending useless spam mails! Call your network admin, call Symantec and McAfee and Panda, call the company managing your virus-protected mail system.
And I call to those mentioned companies, to everyone developing gateways that do filter and bounce spam and viruses: do the obvious! If you know a virus uses only spoofed sender addresses, make your gateway to NOT reply to those!