SPAM EMAIL - Avoid setting delivery receipt requests to automatic

As a safe practice, folks should always avoid responding to spammers. This includes even opting out of spam as any request to do so would be ignored.  In fact by doing so, they would know they have a valid and active email address to use and send to even more spammers.

Trend Micro is warning about a new spamming technique, where automatic delivery receipts may be used to validate whether email messages are valid.  Unless, automatic delivery receipts are needed, they should be turned off to avoid providing spammers with valid address information.

SPAM EMAIL - Avoid setting delivery receipt requests to automatic
http://blog.trendmicro.com/spam-using-e-mail-delivery-notifications-to-verify-valid-addresses/

QUOTE: Advanced Threats Researcher Paul Ferguson recently reported of spammers using a feature called ‘delivery receipt request’ to verify if a certain email address exists. Delivery receipts are messages sent to the original sender of an email message to verify that the sent message has been delivered to the intended recipient.

While message delivery receipt acknowledgment is indeed available in popular desktop mail clients (such as Microsoft Outlook), and can be selectively ignored, most Web email platforms automatically send a delivery receipt when requested to do so if the targeted account exists. It may be beneficial to set this off and information on MS Outlook can be found below:

Microsoft Outlook Controls (for setting this on/off)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192929