Unknown users (From Salisbury Journal)
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Unknown users
12:33pm Monday 1st October 2007 in Your Computer
Are you plagued by Spam, I know I am. Late last year I was getting up to 3,000 emails every day!
There is obviously no way to deal with this much mail manually, more than 95% was spam.
I use a number of filters and programs to deal with the spam itself (Eudora and Spamnix) but I noticed that a large number of the mails I was getting had ridiculous email addresses, for example xyz123@cravenplan.co.uk.
We deliberately set up our email system so that user names which were not on the specified list would come to me - this meant that if someone misspelt or mistyped an address it would still be dealt with. The spammers have made this helpful approach much less viable.
If you own your own domain and you receive mail addressed to fictitious users, ask the company looking after your email to turn off "unknown users" and reject mail sent to these addresses. We cut the amount of Spam by almost 50% by doing this.
Chris Stanbury - Cravenplan Computers (specialists in web design and web marketing) - www.cravenplan.co.uk. Chris also acts as an expert witness on IT cases - www.it-expert-witness.co.uk.
