Mail routing with exchange 2000

This is a very common spam attack these days and is called Directory Harvesting.  

Spammers want to deliver mail to as many people as possible but they are only given ceratin amount of valid web address.  Once they know your e-mail domain exists, they reason that there must be other address in that domain also and so start generating e-mails to be sent to random address at that domain.

I work for a small 30 person company and we are blocking roughly 15000 - 20000 of these e-mails each week.

Those stories you hear in the news that 75% of e-mail traffic is spam.......here is the reason :)



With regards your backup issue, remove and reselect what needs to be backed up and that error will disappear.  I have had that many times these past few weeks as I am in the middle of migrating users to new exchange servers.  After the user is moved, the backup job still tries to backup that mailbox from the original server.  As the user has been moved it also does not show up to deselect it.  Like I say, just uncheck the selected, select them again and save the selections and that error will dissapear.  

I understand the Idea of directory harvesting.  But what I don't get is how the emails get through if the email address never existed.  or is it just getting routed to me because the software is seeing it as spam and all spam is supposed to be routed to me.

That is what I thought might be the case.

thank you for your help and explination.