Unknown email user notification

Mon Jul 26 15:04:52 2004 Unknown email user notification
Posted by Tony Lawrence
Search Keys: mail,spam
Referencing: /Blog/B868.html

As nice as it is to notify people that they may have mis-typed an email address, the current spam climate makes that polite response a bad idea. It's better to just silently throw the messages away. Notifying the spammer either lets them know that you exist or just clogs up your mail queue with undeliverable messages because their return address is bogus.

There are a number of ways to handle that. See SME server virus scan notification and double bounce if you are using SME. If you control your mail server, you may have a way to silently ignore such mail. Sendmail defaults to that behavior, but if you have multiple domains, etc. it may not be doing that.

If your mail server no other way to do this, you may have a "catch-all" account you can direct to a specific user. Unknown users will then go to that account. You can put rules into your mail client that just silently delete all mail that comes there. That effectively prevents any notification, so that helps mailserver congestion, but it still means all those messages have to be downloaded. Better that than nothing, though.

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