Cruzio Consultants -- Important Update

[consultants@mycruzio.com]

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