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

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