Re: Pesky spammers are using my mailbox

[Chris Wedgwood <cw () f00f org>]

On Sat, May 31, 2003 at 07:16:08PM +0100, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

> seems some spammers are using one of my personal domains as the from
> field in their emails, the local-part being random so I cant easily
> block it.

Block *all* addresses except those actually being used[1]...  I had to
do this years ago for a customer who has '@foo.com -> mailbox' when
some moron spammed about 10e6 messages from <random>@foo.com and the
bounces began to hurt.

Dumping all but the few legitimate fed () foo com, lucy () f00f com or
whatever worked pretty well and the load on the system dropped
radically as things we stopping early in the SMTP conversation and
thus the system wasn't actually having to try to deal with much state
most of the time.


  --cw

[1] You probably also want to make sure postmaster@ works (RFC
    requirement) and probably abuse@ (procmail/vacation auto-responder
    exclaiming your innocence)