All of a sudden I’ve been getting a huge increase in email spam. Oh, I hate it! I really, really hate. But then, don’t we all?!
I repeatedly notified my email vending service of each piece of spam. Hundreds of them. Futile.
Initial Attack
So I decided to take matters into my own hands. If they weren’t going to do anything about it, by god, I would!
I’m pretty good about writing email rules to delete unwanted solicitation, you know: those pesky emails you get despite the fact that you have unsubscribed from the list1 20 times. I probably easily have over a hundred email rules that just delete those immediately without my ever seeing them. But the asshole spamming me to death hid his/her identity and even the identity of the email address to which the email arriving to me was being sent. Without that information, writing an email rule is much more difficult.
So, time to get serious! Super serious!
All Out Assault
I dug into the email headers to see what I could find out. I saw that these emails were always coming from a specific Oracle server address. Ahah! I wrote a complex email rule that would scan the header of all incoming emails and immediately delete the ones that came from that specific Oracle server address.
Huge mistake.
I should have tested my new rule first by having it color all of the emails it would delete red without immediately deleting them. In that way I could have seen what emails it would have deleted if it had been set to delete instead of color red. I didn’t.
You guessed it.
With the single touch of my trackpad, all but 7 emails in my inbox were instantly gone forever! Hundreds of emails I had been saving for one reason or the other just went Poof! Oh well. Nothing I could do. Seems this wasn’t a specific server address but rather the operating system for email servers.
Apparently the vast majority of emails (over 99%) that land in my inbox go through one Oracle email server or perhaps I really bombed writing the email rule2 .
At any rate, there has been something immensely freeing about having the weight of all of the emails permanently lifted from my life. And, ironically, I’ve not received any more Spam from that hideous user.