From consultants at mycruzio.com Wed Oct 24 15:29:13 2007 From: consultants at mycruzio.com (consultants@mycruzio.com) Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 15:29:13 -0700 Subject: Cruzio Consultants -- Important Update Message-ID: Hello, This is an FYI that we are ceasing support of the Forward Unknown feature in our Classic Servers. Below is the email we are sending to customers who have Forward Unknown set in their control panel. If you have customers with domains hosted on our Classic servers, they may call you with questions, so this is a heads up about the upcoming changes. Nothing is changing with our new Web hosting package. The main thing your customers need to do is make sure every email address in use on their domain resolves to either a mailbox or a forwarding alias to a mailbox. If you have any questions, please let us know, Thanks, The Cruzio Consultants Team ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Cruzio Customer, This letter is to inform you of an upcoming change in the way Cruzio provides email for your domain. Some Background: ---------------- An email address points to a password protected mailbox, a forwarding alias, an autoresponder or a mailing list. The purpose of the Forward Unknown feature in your domain control panel is to direct email to a domain email address that does not point to anything, literally an unknown address, to a mailbox on the domain, usually the postmaster mailbox. Spammers have increasingly used a tactic refered to as a "dictionary attack". They download publically available lists of registered domains, and send thousands of emails to a "dictionary" of common email logins: bob at domain.com boba at domain.com bobb at domain.com and so on, tens or hundreds of thousands of times The Problem: ------------ Because of the huge increase in the use of dictionary style spam storms directed against a domain, vastly more email has been channeled to "catch-all" mailboxes to which email to unknown addresses is forwarded. If the catch-all mailbox is also set to apply spam filters to incoming messages, a flurry of tens or hundreds of thousands of emails sent to the catch-all mailbox can cause the machine hosting the mailbox to devote more and more resources to the spam filtering, resulting in a degradation in server performance. What We Need To Do: ------------------- Cruzio, like most other hosting and email providers, is forced to discontinue support for Forward Uknown on our domain servers for this reason. You are receiving this message because your domain has Forward Unknown set. We ask that you login to your domain control panel, select the Mail Forwarding option, then in the Mail Forwarding menu, towards the bottom, to select the Reject Unknown option. Before switching off this feature in your control panel, it is advisable to first make an inventory of all the email addresses in use by your domain. You will want to make sure there is: 1. a password protected mailbox to receive email sent to the email address, or 2. a forwarding alias which forwards messages for that address to an existing mailbox. For help with this, please call Cruzio Tech Support at 459-6301 option 4. Regards, The Folks at Cruzio