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Change of Email Address

For the last few months I've been phasing in a new email address. You can find it here. Today I've finally laid my old address to rest. If you mail me using jake@codestore.* you will get the mail returned. Sorry. Blame the spammers, not me.

The crunch-point came this weekend when I was at my parent's and decided to pass some time by checking my email. Quite some time passed before I'd deleted all the spam - there must have been about 200. Without my trusty mail client I had to do it by hand. Who knows if I deleted an important mail while I was at it?

How I did it: Created a new user in the NAB called "Spam Man", with a short name "jake" and no mail system specified. Then I changed the shortname in my Person document to "jake.howlett". The only problem I can see with this approach is that my server's outgoing mail.box is going to flood with undeliverable returned mails (Spammers don't use real reply-to addresses). Anybody know a better way to change your email address on a Domino server?

Update: Thanks to Dave Clark for letting me know how to do it all a lot simpler and keep from messages ever getting stuck in my mail.box. No need for a dummy user. All I need to do was add jake@codestore.XXX to the 'Deny Messages for the following internet addresses' field in the server configuration document in Router/SMTP -> Restrictions & Controls -> SMTP Inbound Controls.

Comments

    • avatar
    • Ian Cherrill
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 03:35

    Jake - why not give SpamMan a real mail file and set a purge interval of a few days?

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 03:48

    Ian, I need real users who still use my old address (hopefully not that many of them) to get a delivery failure notification, rather than the mail falling in to a black hole.

    • avatar
    • Mark
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 06:52

    Jake - If you use Ian's idea couldn't you just put an auto responser on the mailbox ?

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 06:56

    An auto responser on the mailbox? What be that?

  1. By Auto responder, he might mean activating the "Out of Office" agent and changing the message to whatever you want like "Sorry... but I had to shut this address down because of the #@%! Spammers". Anyway spam is not going to go away any time soon and it is only a matter of time before they discover your new address. DNS black lists are only mildly effective. I am convinced that the only effective way of keeping spam from getting to your inbox is thru the use of a Bayesian filter such as Postini or SpamAssassin

  2. Chris Linfoot is kicking arse and taking names in the spam war.

    www.chrislinfoot.net

    He admins a domino domain and at last count I think he's using 5 or 6 different technologies to block, trap or otherwise irradicate spam and viruses in email.

    • avatar
    • James Jennett
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 09:51

    That's {Link} kids.

    • avatar
    • Richard
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 10:34

    Jake - a quick query about spambots, do they have the intelligence to havest the email addresses that you have on this page?

    I know you have them wrapped in javascript, but upon looking at this page's source code, I'm sure a s'bot could havest them ...

    • avatar
    • Cory Boehm
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 10:55

    I consider myself to be one of the "lucky" ones. I used to receive huge volumes of spam and would guess I still do. My ISP put in place a BrightMail spam filter on all incoming mail and it catches most of the spam now. As an added bonus they let you have multiple e-mail address aliases, mostly from their take-over of other ISPs. It is also possible to create personal black and white lists on the mail server. So basically I have it configured like this:

    1 - All e-mail BrightMail says is spam delete.

    2 - Any e-mail to my real address goes in my inbox. This address I only give out to people I know and only in person.

    3 - Mail that is addressed to any other address is sent to a special folder for view that is seperate from my inbox. This includes non-primary e-mail addresses that I can use for things like web pages.

    4 - Anyone that is specifically lists on the whitelist gets sent to the inbox.

    Now I have one problem remaining, there is someone that needs my address to send me legitmate e-mail from time to time but also forwards a lot of junk to me, typically with an attachment, however the e-mails I want typically do not have an attachment. Unforutnately this system does not let me say that person_x can only send plain text e-mails.

    Oh well maybe in the next upgrade...

    Moral of the story here, if your ISP is letting you get spammed to death complain to them and tell them to put in a BirghtMail system or you will change your serivce to someone else that offers it.

    Cory.

    • avatar
    • Jake
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 11:15

    Richard - spambots could potentially harvest *any* email address. To do this they would have to be coded to look for all variations of "encoding". The chances of them looking for this function are slim.

    Cory - This server is under my control so I am my own ISP in a way.

    • avatar
    • mark
    • Tue 30 Mar 2004 16:16

    Jake, have you tried this openntf release, ??

    {<a href="http://www.openntf.org/Projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectHome?ReadForm&Query=kSpam">Link</a>}

    • avatar
    • Ian Cherrill
    • Wed 31 Mar 2004 07:20

    I'm not convinced myself that Bayesian filters are the way forward. Granted they sometimes work well for a while, but they identify on the frequency of a word or phrase in the email. All we get now is spammers adding phrases to email to reduce the chance of being stopped. And as a technique for avoiding getting caught that works well. The future isn't here yet, but I suspect it will involve whitelists.

  3. hi all,

    i am facing some problem in Lotus.

    i think this will helpful for me to get the solutions.

    how to change

    1)domino domain

    2)internet domain

    thanks,

    pradeep

    • avatar
    • pradeep kumar padhy
    • Thu 16 Dec 2004 23:41

    pl send some solutions

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Written by Jake Howlett on Tue 30 Mar 2004

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CodeStore is all about web development. Concentrating on Lotus Domino, ASP.NET, Flex, SharePoint and all things internet.

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