Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 12:24:46 +0000 From: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> To: FreeBSD List <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Mysterious emails Message-ID: <20021105122446.GA98973@happy-idiot-talk.infracaninophi> In-Reply-To: <20021105115907.GA1234@raggedclown.net> References: <20021105115907.GA1234@raggedclown.net>
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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:
20021105115907.GA1234@raggedclown.net
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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