:fail: no such address here

[Jim]

:fail: no such address here

Large inboxes full of tens of thousands of old emails will cause mail problems on your email account. The server is not designed to archive thousands of emails on one account, and it should be downloaded and stored on your computer and on some type of backup media.

Some problems which arise will be extremely long page load time on WEBMAIL, or your mail reader timing out while the server attempts to load the large number of files into memory and show them to you. Another problem may be that duplicate emails start to show up in your inbox. And yet another unexplained problem, the password to one or more random email accounts on the domain will stop working. Anything taken to the extreme, such as 100,000 email files in a folder, will cause problems.

To avoid this problem altogether you should never use a catch all email account, NOT leave mailboxes abandoned to collect spam. Only use mailboxes that you have specifically created, and keep the default email account set to:

:fail: no such address here

Also the mailboxes should be downloaded and deleted from the server regularly. Ideally every time the mail is checked. This is the default setting for most mail readers. "Leaving a copy on the server" is an alternate setting and will cause problems.

If you have a mailbox that is huge and you just want to get rid of the mail to free up disc space quota the easiest way to do it is to delete the mail account through cPanel, and set it back up (if needed).

****************************

The main reason for this announcement is that there is a HUGE volume of spam circulating through the Internet right now, and it's looking like the main area of attack is domains that accept anything@thedomain.tld

The spam seems to have tripled in the last week on all servers, and it is 95% due to domain's set up to accept it all. We set up a proxy last night to filter some of the mail from the two highest spam recievers on a server and have filtered about 17,000 since midnight. But we have at least 50 domains getting 100,000+ spam in the last 5 days. All of those are avoidable and a 1 minute fix.

Today's Stats

root@southbend-104 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
448948

root@southbend-11 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
141836

root@southbend-114 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
717235

root@southbend-134 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
227406

root@sacts-220 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
470675

root@southbend-24 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
388084

root@southbend-34 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
298921

root@southbend-50 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
376083

root@southbend-54 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
34780

root@southbend-64 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
421757

root@southbend-74 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
106702

root@sacts-92 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
223468

root@southbend-94 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
142548

root@una [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
38461

root@sacts-180 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
245532

root@southbend-124 [/var/log]# grep -c 2007-03-01 exim_mainlog
204414

Total Emails = 4,486,850

Easily 75% Spam, thats a conservative guess.

*.75

3,365,137 Spams in 21 hours. 160,000+ an hour.

But even that is conservative. sb-74 mail log was cleared about 2 hours ago and its up to 100,000, and the Sacramento servers are olnly 17 hours into their day.


And Page-Zone is just a miniscule little blip on the radar. We probably have one billionth of the hosting market cornered .

Anyone care to guess the total amount of SPAM (worldwide) today?