Spam Gone From Hotmail Account

[RayH]

I have several Hotmail accounts. My original account, over five years old, was definitely relegated to a spam box. And that it would receive.

Anyway, I let the account lapse for about a month or two. Then, I checked in the account again. It did wipe out all the e-mail in the account, including some unimportant SAVED messages.

But that account gets no more spam. I've been checking it for about a week now.

[EzyStvy]

Send an email to it and see if it bounces back cause the account is closed

[Force Flow]

Hotmail closes an account after 30 days of inactivity, I believe. That means all messages are deleted, and if you want to used the account again (send or recieve mail), you have to activate it.

[MonkeyBlitch]

Yeah it does, i had to activate it again.

[RayH]

I hardly use the account. I think I reactivated it again in case I need a fourth e-mail box for "one to a customer" rebate!

[enhanced08]

what hotmail does is after 30 days of no activity it shuts down the account untill you activate it again. if it goes for 90 days, it will delete the account totally. when the spam mailers see that the account is shut down, they stop sending the mail. this is what happened to my email on my website before i decided to buy it.
i hope that helped, i kinda know what i'm talking about

[RayH]

The particular box was a spam magnet box. I think it shows that actually a very few entities are probably generating about 90% of all the spam!

[David_Jones]

I find it hard to believe that the bounces had any effect whatsoever.

(Most?) SPAM seems to have fake return address headers, so the bounces wouldn't get to the sender in most cases anyway.

Whan you sent an email to the account, did it get delivered to hotmail? If so, and assuming you don't have the 'exclusive' filtering set, then I would love to know what it going on!

David.

[RayH]

All I can tell you is that the account had been active for almost 5 years. It's been a total spam box. The thing used to generate hundreds of spam weekly.

All I know is that since reactivation, I've gotten nothing.

[David_Jones]

Whe you say re-activation, do you mean that you have successfully received email from another account?

If not, then perhaps absolutely *everything* is blocked, which would explain the absence of spam.

David.

[RayH]

I've reopened the account. The account is now active. The account works. I've e-mailed myself. It no longer gets spam.

[David_Jones]

Very interesting - I am flummoxed as to how that could happen!

Just to be explicit, when you say you have emailed yourself, do you mean that you have received email from another account to the hotmail account?

Also, are you able to check the filter settings in hotmail?

I would love to be able to replicate this, since I have a hotmail account that some (computer illiterate) relatives use to send me email, and I cannot possibly risk asking them to send to a new address else it will all turn to custard for them (and they are 12,000 miles away).

Thanks,

David.