>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]").
How'd they set this up? Was it something they created, or something off the
shelf? Sounds like a great use of 'nobody'!
T. Bradley Dean
(800) 793-8171 Ext. 336
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Scott Perry
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 1:31 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IMail Forum] nobody alias- Is this a good thing??
> 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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