Outlook Express Email Rules

This is just something a little informative for those of you out there who use Outlook Express 6 and have dabbled in setting up Mail Rules for incoming email.

Although quite basic in structure, I ran into a serious problem with a rule I had once set up.
In the Outlook Express -->Tools-->Message Rules -->Mail-->Mail Rules there is an option in Actions to 'Reply with Message'. So far, no brainer.

Well, a particular individual(s) thought it would be cute to keep incrementing 1 number in each domain making it a pain in the ass to filter the emails based on a single domain.
(example - jerk@domain1, [email protected]@domain99)

So I decided to use a wildcard to catch all these little bastards into one rule and automatically send these emails to the delete bin. sounds great right? well yes - it was..and for all practicle purposes, worked like a charm. So, brilliant me, I thought I'd take it one step further and fight back by a 'Reply with Message' for ANY email containing part of the domain name (the wildcard I setup). Only thing is...I set it up to send 10 replies for every 1 email they sent (I copied the Mail Rule 10 times). I thought I'd clog up their goddamn server for once.

BIG MISTAKE. Little did I consider returned emails. After so many of my automatic emails, maybe 50 or so...THEY had an automatic email program set up to run as well. OH CRAP.

Yeah, you guessed it. They started returning EVERY one of my emails. For 50 emails they returned...my wonderful rule..sent an additional 10 PER email...ok, now Im sending 500 emails..and guess what? yep.. 500 returned...I think I killed it when I was about to start sending some 5000 emails.

Point? - be weary of what rules you set up..no matter how good you think they are.

It is a good rule but remember most spam are off relays so you more or less had a good rule the fault being sending a reply. Ofter better to just delete them after all why bother they know they ave a valid addy with you. Duck and cover your spam will increase, never bother to even open the stuff most spam have web bugs that will tell the spammer your a valid email.

Moral of the story: the best way to deal with spam is to set up some smart filtering rules and ignore it. By replying (assuming it doesn't bounce from a forged header), all you've done is validate your address to the spammer and guarantee yourself some more junk mail.

As for Palemoon's point about web bugs, most Windows personal firewalls have application-aware proxies that will restrict the ports and addresses that a given application is allowed to connect on. You can restrict Outlook to ports 110 and 25 on your mail server, and you won't have to worry about that problem.

Welcome to planet Earth, my friend. :D