How can I delete SPAM 'Delivery Failure' Emails at the server..?

A friend of mine is having problems with large numbers of "Your EMail was Undeliverable" type messages coming into his inbox.

The original messages contain a 'Please Send Money' scam and were not sent from my friends account, someone is just spoofing the 'From' address.

The problem is that the SPAM-bot is sending out a massive numebr of emails but many are to accounts that so not exist - hence the undeliverable errors.

He is using Outlook Web Access (provided by his ISP) and does not have the ability to mark messages are Junk or to create a Rule that will scan the body of the email (only the subject and sender). I have been able to create some basic rules to move many of the messages to the Deleted Items folder (based on a common subject) but I'm worried about being too generic in case I end up deleting genuine messages.

How can I stop these messages from filling up his Inbox/Deleted Items..?

Thanks in Advance

Answer

Just something to consider: if the ISP isn't doing some proper spam filtering, you might want another provider for your email. If you subscribe your friend for a GMail account, he'd still have a web interface plus POP3/IMAP access and he can just forget about his ISP-provided mail account.

I hate it too, though. I've had a CompuServe account since 1993 and around 1999/2000 I started having some serious spam problems with that account. Fortunately, I've always had multiple mail accounts so I avoided my CompuServe account, which would just end up being flooded. I added some rules to this account to just forward emails from people on my whitelist to my new account and all other emails were just trashed. (I did check their senders and titles before trashing them, though.)

I stopped using Compuserve in 2005. I wasn't receiving any more important emails on that account and even stopped checking it for new emails. It was all spam anyways and Compuserve didn't bother to do something about it so I had no use for it.

Complain to the ISP, telling them to take action against this flood of spam. They should be able to recognize it and thus block it even before it reaches your mailbox.
Or just forget that mailbox and use GMail instead, adding rules to your old mailbox to just forward any important messages to the new account.

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For businesses, there's also the Google Postini services which aren't free but might be useful for people who run their own business with their own domain name. Or people who can't switch provider.