1,378 Deliver Status Notification Emails can't be good.

March 7, 2005 4:37 PM

I have a domain hosted through a pretty reputable hosting company. The associated email that I check about once a week and usually yields no more than five to ten offers to refinance my home now has 1,378 "Delivery Status Notification: Failure" emails in it. Is this bad? What should I do?
posted by jennyb to computers & internet (7 comments total)

delete them. someone has probably sent out a pile of spam with your address as "from", so you've got all the failure messages. it happens, apparently at random. i wouldn't worry about it.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:49 PM on March 7, 2005

Definitely delete them. If it doesn't happen again, don't worry about it.

Consider yourself lucky for only getting 1378 of them.
posted by bh at 5:01 PM on March 7, 2005

Happens all the time, and there's nothing much you can do about it. It's come up on Ask MetaFilter twice already.
posted by xil at 5:24 PM on March 7, 2005

Also, verify that you haven't configured things to deliver email addressed to any user in that domain into that mailbox. If you have, do what you can to only accept mail to known valid recipients (which may just be "postmaster" and "abuse").
posted by mendel at 5:41 PM on March 7, 2005

on the same lines, if you never send email from that account, you might be able to set up a procmail filter to reject them in future (probably not worth the bother if you've never heard of procmail before, though - it's not easy to use).
posted by andrew cooke at 5:48 PM on March 7, 2005

Yeah, definitely check what mendel said--most domain admin accounts have an option for whether mail to [e-mail] gets dumped to the master admin account.

Back in the days before spam, it was useful to catch mail to unknown addresses, in case someone mis-spelled an address, or was trying to reach you but didn't know a legit e-mail. These days, though, it's just a nuisance, and you can almost always turn that off.

If you find that it's _not_ someone using your domain for spam addresses, then check to make sure you don't have an auto-responder on for that account. I had a situation a couple of months ago with a client who turned on auto-responding for her e-mail, and then sent out an e-mail to a list.

Her ISP's auto-responder doesn't have a "just once" auto-respond option--it'll auto-respond to the same address again and again. When a couple of recipients had similar dumb auto-responders on their end, the mail accounts just ping-ponged "Out of Office" messages at each other in an infinite loop until we caught it. Rang up about 1,000 or so messages an hour for the better part of a day.
posted by LairBob at 6:00 PM on March 7, 2005

Whoops! Sorry I missed those other threads and I appreciate the answers in spite of my search feature failings.

I think I do have the "catch all" think enabled and I will go turn it off right now.

Thanks everyone!
posted by jennyb at 6:15 PM on March 7, 2005