Spammers Hate me… In order to defeat your enemy, you should know everything about your enemy. Recently one of my inboxes started getting bombarded with 200+ pieces of spam. But I know spammers, spammers are my friends, I know their strategies and techniques. So in order to defeat one of their own, I use their Achilles heel.
Bounces.
95% of pro spammers remove bounce backs automatically from their lists, which cleans it and makes it more efficient with every run. But in order to do that, you’ll have to ‘delete’ your email OR make it look like it’s deleted at least. Since I control all my emails and never use a 3rd party like gmail, I can easily delete, wait a week or two, then re-instate my email. Now you have to watch out for notices you get from important places, so I suggest creating a 2nd email “CCarter_2@Domain.com”, for example, and going through and updating as many important accounts that you get daily, weekly, or monthly emails from. Also, note newsletters that you actually want to receive, since disabling your email will essentially send a bounce back, and too many of those might trigger an auto delete.
The good news though is if you have CPanel, you don’t even really have to delete your email address, just setup a forward that blocks emails temporarily. That’ll send a bounce back notice to the spammers. I did it for one of the recent overrun inboxes, and only had the email disabled for 2 days (48 hours), and went from 200+ spam messages to 16. 🙂 A 92% drop in spam in 2 days, so yeah, that’s my little trick. (This won’t work on GMAIL, or 3rd party, I don’t think they have ways to disable emails, And if you honestly are using GMAIL at this late date, you got bigger problems to worry about).
Option #1:
Instructions:
1) Login to CPanel.
2) Click on Forward.
3) Click on “Add Forwarder”.
4) Input your email address in the top field and select the domain. Then select “Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time), with the default “No such person at this address” in the Failure Message. Then click add.
And that’s it. Now obviously this will mean for however long you have this setup you won’t be receiving emails – 2 days is good. Doing it over the weekend is good, but honestly, most spammers hit you on Monday through Wednesdays, so those are the best days if any. DOn’t worry, your email programs won’t go nuts with warnings, they just will return ‘no new messages’ since nothing gets to your inbox, the Forward is taking care of it for you. After the 2 days, a week or two pass, just delete the forward, and go back to normal. You should see an IMMEDIATE reduction in spam by at least 60% if you went 2 days. The longer you keep the Forward on, the bigger the reduction. I saw a 92% reduction in 2 days, so that tells me I was on a small close group of spammers, and I was essentially removed from them.
Option #2:
If you don’t have CPanel, just delete your email inbox. Wait a couple of day/weeks, then recreate it. Please Note if you use this version, YOU ARE DELETING YOUR EMAILS – IT WILL DELETE ALL THE EMAILS TO THE EMAIL ADDRESS SAVED ON YOUR SERVER, sooooo make sure you have backups of important emails, especially if you are using imapp to sync your emails. The CPanel forward option disable (Option #1) doesn’t delete your current inbox, so you’ll still have all your past emails saved. This won’t work on 3rd party emails like gmail, hotmail, or yahoo, again. If you delete your emails there, I believe someone else can simply re-register your email address, so that’ll be a huge problem. 🙂
Inb4 mass email flood.
Till next time. 🙂