Email Remover - An Auto-Responder Loop Solution

[Asudem]

Greetings,

So if your company lives in the dark ages like mine and doesn't have an exchange server, there's probably a good chance you've seen once or twice an infinite auto-responder loop. Both participants have their auto-responder on and for some unknown reason, one of them sends the other an email and leaves for the weekend or something only to find thousands of emails on the server when they get back.

The solution, as I've found, is Email Remover. What this does is it allows you to delete emails directly from the server without having to download them all into Outlook or your mail client and delete them manually. Our company uses Network Solutions and it's delete-mail-from-the-server features are very, very lacking. With this tool, I can find the average size of the auto-responded emails and only delete them.

It's a nifty utility for those of us with stone-age email systems and if you're ever dealing with a mass email attack, I'd highly recommend this freeware!

Please feel free to recommend any other similar software in this thread too!

[Shades]

About not having an Exchange Server: ignorance==bliss

Now I am not familiar with the software from Network Solutions, but do run my own Postfix mail server on a "headless" Linux machine (with Webmin) for years. Before that vPOP3 (Windows) and even then it was already easy to delete mail directly on the server. That left with me the impression that all mail server software makers have this functionality built-in.

Postfix is a mature and battle hardened mail server with lots(!) of options to configure if you want to. Making a policy to get rid of such messages is no problem. There are a lot of add-ons that make the creation of such a policy much easier if you are not a fan of command-line configuration.   

[Asudem]

About not having an Exchange Server: ignorance==bliss

Now I am not familiar with the software from Network Solutions, but do run my own Postfix mail server on a "headless" Linux machine (with Webmin) for years. Before that vPOP3 (Windows) and even then it was already easy to delete mail directly on the server. That left with me the impression that all mail server software makers have this functionality built-in.

Postfix is a mature and battle hardened mail server with lots(!) of options to configure if you want to. Making a policy to get rid of such messages is no problem. There are a lot of add-ons that make the creation of such a policy much easier if you are not a fan of command-line configuration.

-Shades (December 13, 2015, 09:11 AM)

Truth be told, I've never worked with an exchange server, but Network Solutions has caused quite a few headaches. It's older version of it's web-mail portal allows you to delete emails from the server, but it's view pane only allows you to select up to 100 emails at a time. Even filtered it would take a very long time to delete all the emails. Network Solutions DID fix this eventually, allowing you to see and select all emails given a specific filter, but only for newly created email addresses. The older emails are stuck with the old version of the web-portal.

Hmmm, Postfix is something I'll definitely look into. Thanks!

[Stoic Joker]

Both participants have their auto-responder on and for some unknown reason, one of them sends the other an email and leaves for the weekend or something only to find thousands of emails on the server when they get back.

-Asudem (December 12, 2015, 10:27 AM)

Oh Damn, now that's funny! I may have to give it a shot sometime.

But seriously, I've been running an Exchange server for a dozen or so years, and am quite happy with it. However I've no idea how ours would respond to this - rather unique - situation. I am definitely going to have to try it sometime -(most likely I'll pit my home lab against the office)- to see what will happen.

[Asudem]

Both participants have their auto-responder on and for some unknown reason, one of them sends the other an email and leaves for the weekend or something only to find thousands of emails on the server when they get back.

-Asudem (December 12, 2015, 10:27 AM)

Oh Damn, now that's funny! I may have to give it a shot sometime.

But seriously, I've been running an Exchange server for a dozen or so years, and am quite happy with it. However I've no idea how ours would respond to this - rather unique - situation. I am definitely going to have to try it sometime -(most likely I'll pit my home lab against the office)- to see what will happen.

-Stoic Joker (December 13, 2015, 11:08 AM)

What usually happens is some company shoots one of our out-of-office employees an email, the auto-responder sends back to them and we get one of those automated "Thank you for your message, we'll get back to you when..." in return and the email cycle of doom starts. I usually deal with this once about every two months. The REAL solution is to not use the server's provided out of office and create an out of office rule within outlook, but that, sadly, is above some of the skill levels of our employees to make work.