De-Spamming

[B.Ob.]

De-Spamming The Inbox: The Hard Way

 

"Even after using precautions like dummy email address in public forums, I have been plagued by the spam mails for long time now. Two years back it used to be a few per day. And since then it has been a steady increase in the volume. As a result, till last weekend I used to get around 200 spam mails a day on my Institute's life-time email account. Then, one fine day (well, actually we were given notice 3 weeks in advance) our Institute decided to upgrade the Exchange mail server to the latest version. Hence the mail server was shut down for approximately 2 days/48 hours (4th Dec evening to 5th Dec noon). During that time, all the mails sent to my mail account were of course bouncing. Between the time when the system was shut down and the time when the system came back online on 5th noon, something miraculous had happened: My spam traffic had reduced considerably. Now I am receiving 'only' (!) 5-6 spam mails everyday! That is a 97.5 % drop in spam traffic! Interesting, eh? So what's happening is that the spammer dudes are dropping the bounced mail IDs like a mad-cow disease affected, well, cow. There doesn't seem to be a second try from spammers: Apparently they don't use the bounced email IDs again. I would assume that after the two-day shut-down/start-up of mail server, my spam traffic would have become zero. My current 'very low' spam traffic is only probably because of my email being available in public domain on webpages where I can not remove it from (damn my early Internet days' Naivete)."