Knowledgebase

Part of the reason you are getting spam is that spammers have very sophisticated techniques for gathering email addresses. If your email address has ever appeared on a webpage or USENET newsgroup, it is probably on a spammer's mailing list by now. This is why we offer formmail.pl service--so that you can set up an email form that does not make your address available to spammers.

However, another method that spammers use to reach people is called a "dictionary attack": they create a list of probable email addresses, called a dictionary, and add @(your site's address) to each one to create a mailing list. Since it costs them little to send thousands of email messages, they can afford to send messages they know mostly do not exist.

Your account includes what is called a "default" email address.
This address is where any message that was not sent to a currently-existing address on your site goes. For instance, if there is no "johnsmith" email address at your site, email addressed to "johnsmith@(your site's address)"
will go to the Default mailbox. If your site receives "dictionary attack"
spam, dozens of copies of the same message will go to the Default mailbox.

If you have not changed any settings in the Mail Manager, your Default mailbox may be set to forward to an email address with the same name as your site's login ID. Many users never use or check this address--which means that over time thousands of "dictionary attack" spam messages can build up in it and use up disk quota. Other users may unknowingly set this address to forward to their personal mailbox, or to a remote mailbox elsewhere--which means they could be receiving thousands of spam messages needlessly.

The best thing to do with the Default mailbox is to set it to reject messages and not send a bounce message. Do this by clicking on "Mail Manager" in your control panel, then clicking on "Default" in the list in the left-hand (gray) column of the screen. This means that the messages will not be received or passed on and will not take up space in any of your mailboxes. It will not take care of all of your spam, but will eliminate any dictionary attacks.

For the rest of your spam, our plans include excellent spam-filtering systems at no additional charge. Just go to your Control Panel to set them up.