Slight email changes

On Friday the 23rd of December we will be mass updating a number of email accounts.

Any account that has a non customised ‘bounce’ option set will automatically be updated to the ‘reject’ option. If you have a customised bounce message set, no changes will be made for the time being.

Why are we doing this?

With the bounce option set, each time a mail is sent to an invalid mailbox on an account the mail is bounced. For valid email addresses this is acceptable. If the email is sent from an invalid address, the mail server is forced to attempt resending to the invalid mailbox. This causes overly large mailqueues and slows down the receipt and sending of email on the server.

Secondly, some emails are created specifically to bounce. This allows spam emailers to use your account to send email. The email is sent to your account and bounces not to the sender, but to the spammers target recipient. The resultant effect is that your account appears to be sending the spam email. This can lead to the blacklisting of your site and the whole server.

Future mail sent to non-existent mailboxes will be rejected. This helps to keep the mail load on the server lower, and increases performance for all users.