Project tarbaby

From Computer Tyme Support Wiki

Revision as of 14:17, 18 August 2008

Project Tarbaby helps you reduce spam and helps us build our blacklist. This is done by adding a fake MX record to your existing MX lists. The fake MX record will be your highest numbered MX and it will point to one of our servers. We will not actually receive any of your email under any circumstances. We will return a 451 temporary error immediately after the DATA command. This tells the sender to come back later and try again. Good email is never lost using this method.

Spammers however often try to go in the "back door" thinking that your backup servers hae less spam filtering than your main email server. So they send email to the highest numbered MX record first. And spammers don't retry so they make an attempt, it fails, and they go on. Generally real messages would never hit this server, but if all your servers are down there is still no harm done. We can tell the difference between real email and virus infected spam bots.