Shutting Down Exchange Server

[Steve R Jones]

My small 15 person company gets more than its fair share of spam. Ten of the people are in the group Support@CompanyName. So one piece of spam hits all ten people. We’re using filters etc.....

Having read an article the other day, we are going to shut down our exchange server over the weekend. The theory behind this is that the mail will bounce back and maybe we’ll get removed from some of the spam lists.

We might maybe have a few clients that freak out but the theory behind this kind of sounds promising.

Thoughts??

[Sterling_Aug]

I forwarded the original article to several of my co-workers and one of them freaked. He never even read the article but started asking a million questions about "has this been tested on different OSs, the impact on the clients, etc."

It should work, at least for a while.

You may want to look into "Mailwasher" as a more permanent solution to spam.

http://www.mailwasher.net/

[r8500]

Heres my problem with this idea Steve. Exchange has the ability to continue to try to send mail for several days when it has trouble reaching the server it is trying to get to. I imagine most other mail servers have those settings as well. In theory, I am thinking that shutting down the server will do nothing, but delay the time it takes for the spam to arrive. Now there are some excellent spam fighting tools for Exchnage out there for free, or low cost.

What version Exchange you running?

[Steve R Jones]

We're running 5.5 in our California office. Our IT guy has spent a bunch of time fighting the spam. We're just going to give this a try. Thanks for the replies.