[Herts] black hole emails

[Ian Gregory]

On Tue, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:09:48PM +0000, Tony Friis wrote:
 
> Does anyone know how to send an email to oblivion?
> I have an ISP who lets me use any number of emails in front of my domain 
> name, such as this at friis.co.uk that at friis.co.uk or theother at friis.co.uk 
> one or two of these (say that at friis.co.uk) now collect so much spam I 
> just want to throw them all away. At present I use an email rule in 
> Thunderbird to send them straight to trash, but I still have to empty 
> them from the trash.
> 
> My ISP lets me redirect any particular address like that at friis.co.uk 
> wherever I want, I was hoping to redirect it to somewhere like - perhaps
> 
>     blackhole at null.com

There are various spam sinks that people have created where they
welcome spam because it gives them data to analyse. At least there
were - I can't remember any now.

But if you just want an address which is bound to fail and not cause
anyone else any hassle then use something like foo at bar.invalid

The important bit is the .invalid - from rfc2606:

> ".invalid" is intended for use in online construction of domain
> names that are sure to be invalid and which it is obvious at a
> glance are invalid.

This will fail at the first hurdle because the DNS resolver will
know it is invalid without even doing any lookups.

But as others have said, there must be better "solutions" than
forwarding to an invalid address.

Ian

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/