> I added the nobody alias in an effort to track down some spammers. I
> think it will help, but I was amazed at the quantity of emails the
> account sees. In about 12 hours the account received over 200 emails.
> Is this par for the course for a ISP sever handling about 1000
> accounts??
There are a lot of factors, such as how long the domain has been around, and whether
or not your domain is similar to another that has a lot of traffic.
The easiest way to find out whether or not those are legitimate is to look at them.
Are most of those 400 E-mails a day very short with no obvious content to them? That
would likely indicate a spammer harvesting E-mail addresses (although they don't
actually need to send an E-mail to determine if it is a valid address).
Typically if they are old addresses, the E-mails will mostly be pseudo-spam ("almost
unsolicited E-mail"), such as when someone didn't see the "Check this box if you don't
want us to E-mail you" box when signing on to a web site, and mailing lists.
> Is this use of the nobody alias really a good thing?? IMHO it at
> least cuts down on some unnecessary internet traffic simply because
> these messages aren't bounced. 98+% of them appear to be pretty much
> trash email anyway.
If you bounce the messages, and they are listservers/pseudospam, they will likely end
up removing the invalid address, which would also minimize spam. It's unlikely that
you'll see signs of E-mail address harvesting, so it may not be all that useful.
One site that I worked with had the nobody alias point to a program alias that would
use a "sounds like" algorithm to make suggestions as to the real address the user
wanted (IE if they sent it to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", it would suggest
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]").
--
-Scott
Declude: Anti-virus and Anti-spam solutions for IMail. http://www.declude.com
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