On Tue, Nov 05, 2002 at 12:59:07PM +0100, Cliff Sarginson wrote: > I wonder if anyone can throw some light on this. > I get a *lot* of emails addressed to non-existant users > on my domain "raggedclown.net". They all follow a pattern > > A single alphabetic character followed by 3 numbers. > e.g. a1025, b3471 > > Now why is is anyone doing this ? These are very unlikely names, > and non of the normal aliases are tried. I don't think it is a DoS > either, since although they come in bursts they are usually in groups of > up to 7 or so...and not every day..which is not going to grind me to a halt.
These are almost definitely the result of incompetent spammers trying to harvest e-mail addresses from mail archives on the web or some such. They would seem to be completely unable to distinguish between an e-mail address and a message ID --- eg. the mesage I'm replying to has the ID number: [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can see where the bogus addresses come from... A true BOFH would of course simply use the sendmail LUSER_RELAY facility to pipe the bogus messages straight into 'spamassassin -r' Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks Savill Way Marlow Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message