Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Monday, December 13, 2004

Posted 8:05 AM by Anurag

Do not try this at home (or corporate/school/place of your non-choice).

Okay, okay, I goofed up, jumped the gun, got ahead of myself, did whatever you call it by misconjecturig and misconstruing the results of Exchange server upgradation in my last post. Lot of /. readers (somebody said in the comments that these guys have bloated egos. Tell me about it!) pointed out probable flaws in the situation as put forth by me. Of course, some readers (I am supposing they are not slashdot regulars!) supported my article too with their own similar experience.

Anyhoo, let's get it done with. Major arguments aganist the radical spam-reduction method 'proposed' by me were:
1) Spammers don't care two hoots about if the mail addresses are bouncing.
2) During the upgrade, my school might have upgraded/included the/a spam filter.

Opinion about point 1) is still divided and I am not sure if I can say much about that point. To have a credible opiion on that, we need a certified-spammer (?) to come forward and explain.

But, about point 2), well, I can tell you now that is exactly what happened during our server upgrade. After being thrown around like a tennis ball on my comments page (man, u /.ers have no mercy!), I hurriedly talked to sysadmin who told me that before server upgradation, there was no content-filteration at our mail server. But during the Exchange server upgradation, they installed InterScan Messaging Security Suite, a comprehensive content-filtering product that comes with anti-virus module too. Currently the spam traffic being caught at the server is some 20,000 junk mails a day. Ergo, there you have it: it is because of the IMSS' Advanced Content Filtering and Intelligent, Adaptive Spam Filtering Module that the spam mail was reduced to trickle and not because of the two-day server shutdown.

Well, now.. that's the end of that.

And now, I am moving to Himalayas for a few days so that i don't have to read /.ers' reactions to this! Moreover, I heard of a Sadhu at the top of Himalayas who is said to have a magical solution to spam problems. Apparently a former software engineer, he was so fed up of spam mails that he retreated to Himalayas to be left alone and became a Sadhu. It is rumoured that after his long prayers and meditation, God gave him a solution to Spam. So, here I go to retrieve that from him and to save humanity. Wait till I come back with that new, improved, bigger, and better magical solution!! (Hey, you still believe me?!)

PS: To the people who were planning to shut down server over the weekend, I hope you didn't. If you did, I can only hope you don't read this.

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