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De-spamming Your Inbox The Hard Way
ajain writes "Even after using precautions like dummy email address in public forums, I have been plagued by the spam mails for long time now. Accidentally, I hit upon a not-so-elegant but effective solution recently: Ever thought of shutting down the mail server temporarily to stop spam to your inbox permanently? Well, it seems to work. In my case, a two-day shutdown resulted in 97.5% decrease in spam traffic! Here are the details and a step-by-step guide to this desperate-method of spam reduction. I think I'll model, simulate and then optimize the amount of shut-down time required for spam levels to drop to zero!"
No. Bounces never reach the spammer. Ever. Spammers always use fake sender addresses, so the bounces will go to an innocent bystander.
So, while totally ineffective, you also burden the innocent bystander with yet another bounce.
The only way to combat spam is to reject it on the SMTP level.
Note that the guy in the article was wrong. When a mailserver is offline for two days, no bounces are sent. Sending mailservers will usually retry for 5 days before bouncing the message.
However, spammers don't use mailservers to send their spam, they deliver the spam direcly to the receiving mailserver. They've got instant feedback on wether the spam is accepted by the mailserver or not.
When a mailserver is offline, spammers will know immediately. However I doubt they'd remove your name from the list because of this simple fact. Mailservers are regulary offline for multiple days.
In this case I rather think they installed a very good spamfilter on that brand new Exchange Server.
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