Indirectly related to SA.

[Brian Godette <bg...@idcomm.com>]

  Like some people I run a small internal spamtrap of never used by real 
users addresses for use in feeding Bayes as well as reporting to Razor 
and internal IXHASH. In addition I also have a database that returns 
"550 User unknown" for all email addresses that are "dead", with the 
date they were deactivated.

My question is, at what point would one consider such an address old 
enough for inclusion into a reviewed trap for further training and 
reporting, and at what point, if it were left returning "550 User 
unknown", where it could bypass review?

Re: Indirectly related to SA.

[LuKreme <kr...@kreme.com>]

On 19-Jul-2010, at 10:45, Brian Godette wrote:
> 
> My question is, at what point would one consider such an address old enough for inclusion into a reviewed trap for further training and reporting, and at what point, if it were left returning "550 User unknown", where it could bypass review?

Only you can answer that.

For example, I have an email address that I have not used in *EIGHT* years, and I never used it for much of anything but web forms, but evidently at some point around May of 2000 I must have sent an email to my cousin from it because he just sent me an email on that address and got irritated that he got added to my server's internal blacklist.

As a general rule, I'd say that after rejecting mail on a dead email address for more than a few months, you are likely to have cleared almost all the legitimate email that is not automated (most of those will keep sending forever and ever and ever since they do no bounce processing), but you will *never* clear *all* the potentially legitimate email.

-- 
"A thousand years ago we thought the world was a bowl. Five hundred
years ago we knew it was a globe. Today we know it is flat and round
carried through space on the back of a turtle. Don't you wonder what
shape it will turn out to be tomorrow?" [Lord Vetinari]  --The Truth