Re: [vps-mail] Sendmail - going from spammers.db to access.db

[Marjolein Katsma <tfyj8lv02@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 23:45 2003-11-20, Godwin Stewart wrote:
>Surely if there is no "nospam" user on your domain and no reference to that
>user in virtusermap, any attempt to deliver mail to that user will be
>automatically met with a "User unknown" error straight after the RCPT TO:.
>Unless, of course, you have a catchall address, which is not really a good
>idea anyway.

Yes, 'nospam' was indeed a real example. But I do have a catchall address - and reason enough to keep that so:

The non-used addresses that catch spam are far fewer than the real addresses that I use (obfuscated) on websites to allow people to react directly to a page. I've set up sites so that each page's reaction email address is a direct derivative of the page name; setting up a new postbox whenever I create a new page would not be very efficient, but using page-specific addresses works quite well for me (simply automated with PHP - nothing to set up: a new page "creates" its own reaction email address). These email addresses are heavily obfuscated and not even shown at all to some known (and observed) spambots. These addresses are not harvested. (An older address used before I set up the obfuscation has been harvested - but that's just a single one.)

The addresses used by spammers that I'd like to reject are instead ones created by dictionary and similar approaches; 'nospam' is one; there's also 'marketing', 'sales' and 'info' - none of which have ever been used (let alone published) by me. It's mail to these addresses I'd like to reject rather than silently discard to dev/null. Just a handful of addresses, but they catch a lot of spam now.



-- 
Marjolein Katsma

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