Anurag Jain has a radical idea to clear your inbox of spam: unplug your mail server for several days.
According to Jain’s blogspot blog, the institute of which he is part, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, had to upgrade their Microsoft Exchange server. As a result, the mail server at which Jain received his email, the Institute’s server, was shut down – completely shut down – for approximately two days.
When the server was brought back up, Jain found that his spam had been reduced to a trickle.
Jain compares this process to detoxifying the body, and, while he admits that it’s a radical way to get rid of your spam, he says that it has worked for him.
While Aunty doesn’t doubt Jain’s experience, it does fly in the face of conventional wisdom and shared experience. Jain’s hypothesis is that the spammers removed his email address from their lists after receiving continous bounces from the downed server. However it’s well known in anti-spam circles that spammers almost never bother to remove bouncing email addresses – what do they care? They aren’t receiving the bounce notices anyways, as they didn’t use their real return address in the first place
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
CashApp us
Venmo us
Paypal us
Still, it makes an interesting read, and might, if you are in a position to do so, make for an interesting experiment.
However, that said, Aunty wouldn’t recommend it, and can’t imagine that many would be able to replicate Jain’s positive outcome.
You can read more about this on Anurag Jain’s Blog.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.
CashApp us
Venmo us
Paypal us
This sort of happened to me a couple of weeks ago – all of a sudden, almost all of my email bounced for two days when my mail server got sick. And, you know? It did work. For a couple of weeks. While the level of spam has not actually returned to pre-bounce levels, it is slowly increasing again. It was nice while it lasted.
Wow, they really nailed him on the comments area!