Originally Posted by
Mr Optimistic
Well over the last few months I have been getting increasing amounts of junk mail, 100's every few days. I have progressively created rules to divert these to the junk folder which seems to work except I have to clear the junk folder and check for the odd legitimate post. I got fed up with this and decided to start again so I deleted all the rules. Now I hardly get any junk mail....
It's almost as if creating a rule alerted the spammers to the target.
Can anyone explain this to me ?
Well No, I can't explain it but I can give you an opinion.
It's unlikely that the spammers have detected anything which you've done. It's generally not possible for a sender to trace what happens to an email after they've sent it.
Spam protection is an ongoing war betweent email providers, looking for reliable detection indicators, and the spammers trying to avoid detection.
The system I'm familiar with applies dozens of tests and each test has a score. Scores can be large or small, and positive (likely to be spam) or negative(likely to not be spam). Once all the scores are added together, if they exceed a pre-defined threshold then the message is treated as spam.
It's possible that your 'divert' rules were treated as a sign that you valued the messages and hence applied a negative spam value to the messages which brought them under the spam threshold.
It's also possible that by purging everything you removed some broken data that was causing the spam detector to fail.
...or it could be something else.
What sort of test were you using in the divert rules which you created yourself? Did they all come from the same source?