Friday, November 03, 2006
harrassment spams, coincidence?
Today the postmaster address at my best known domain received more spam than it usually gets in a few months.
Postmaster is a special address. Any domain that gets mail is supposed to have it. Current best practice is you don't spam-filter it, so it can receive complaints and they won't get filtered or blocked.
And if there is any address at a domain that is likely to generate spam complaints, it's postmaster. Spammers are generally smart enough to avoid postmaster addresses. More domains have postmaster than the other special addresses, hostmaster (for name service issues) and abuse.
Could be a random fluke. Could be some spammer with not enough work to do doesn't like people starting blogs about how spamming hurts people. At any rate, the result was I discovered a few more spam sources to block.
By the way, there's a special domain name, too. example.net was reserved when the name service was invented. You can use it when you need an example email address, perhaps when you're writing the on-line help for an email program. You can also use it when somebody demands your email address but you don't want to give them a real one. Like those 555 phone numbers in the movies. Even postmaster@example.net doesn't go anywhere.
Postmaster is a special address. Any domain that gets mail is supposed to have it. Current best practice is you don't spam-filter it, so it can receive complaints and they won't get filtered or blocked.
And if there is any address at a domain that is likely to generate spam complaints, it's postmaster. Spammers are generally smart enough to avoid postmaster addresses. More domains have postmaster than the other special addresses, hostmaster (for name service issues) and abuse.
Could be a random fluke. Could be some spammer with not enough work to do doesn't like people starting blogs about how spamming hurts people. At any rate, the result was I discovered a few more spam sources to block.
By the way, there's a special domain name, too. example.net was reserved when the name service was invented. You can use it when you need an example email address, perhaps when you're writing the on-line help for an email program. You can also use it when somebody demands your email address but you don't want to give them a real one. Like those 555 phone numbers in the movies. Even postmaster@example.net doesn't go anywhere.
