I received mail addressed to “Everybody@” my mailserver. Does such an address exist, and can it be used to more easily deliver unsolicited bulk email from off-site?
In general, no, such aliases do not exist. Just as the sender of a message can be “forged”, the recipient list can be, too. With many mail clients, you can add “Bcc:” destinations, to specify recipients whose address won’t be revealed to other recipients–that is, won’t be included in the “To:” header. When using a “fake recipient” such as “To: everybody”, that is essentially what the person sending the message does. This avoids sending individual messages to each user, or having an enormous list of addresses in the “To:” header, and using the “fake recipient” avoids the confusion of addressing the message to one recipient, and bcc’ing a large number of others. In some cases, however, mailing list addresses do themselves get placed on unsolicited mass-mailing lists. Closing the list and requiring the intervention of a moderator to send a message can solve that problem, but in some cases that requires changing a simple “mailing list alias” into an alias managed by a package, such as Maj
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