SPAM and Email Blackholes

I've written about SpamArrest in my November entry Fight SPAM Automatically. After 59 days, here are the results...

SpamArrest processed 460,915 messages. Of these, a whopping 99.88% was blocked.

At first I thought: "Whoa! It's a good thing I didn't have to waste my time wading through all that junk mail!"

But then I wondered: "How is the email system holding up with all that pounding?"

If you can talk with your email administrator, you can suggest that they "blackhole" emails sent to non-existing addresses.

That's what some junk emailers do. They send email to "whatever"@viloria.com, for example. They put in various first names hoping that their message will someone land in an existing mailbox.

By setting up "blackholes", the mailserver won't have to answer back with "Sorry, that address does not exist." And if they don't have to waste time writing back to spammers (who also use invalid addresses), your mailserver can focus on the emails that are truly bound for you.
[ First posted on 01/20/2005 by Manuel Viloria ]