Exchange black hole
Black Holes - not just a space thing!
As users leave your company, you will more than likely delete their mailbox after a certain amount of time. It is then common for the SMTP address of the departed employee to be added to another mailbox, or a public folder, perhaps being monitored by the departed employee’s manager. The aim is to make sure that any important business email is acknowledged for some amount of time after the user has left.
Clearly there is a long term issue with this method, since eventually, the monitoring of the messages sent to that address will stop. Removing the SMTP address from the organisation will obviously not stop messages being sent to that address; there are always going to be those pesky spam messages, and additionally, your Exchange server has to generate a non-delivery report for each message.
One solution to put the issue out of your mind is to implement what is sometimes referred to as the ‘black hole’ method. This allows your Exchange server to simply delete the messages sent to specific SMTP addresses, whilst at the same time never generating a non-delivery report for these messages.
Here are the 3 simple steps to implement the black hole method:
1. Create a distribution list (Exchange 5.5) or a mail-enabled distribution group (Exchange 2000).
2. Make sure that there are NO members in this distribution list/group. This is the key part to this tip.
3. Add the SMTP addresses of the ex-employees to the distribution list/group. Add them as secondary SMTP addresses in exactly the same way you would for a mailbox.
Now, when messages are sent to these problematic SMTP addresses, Exchange silently deletes them. No non-delivery reports are generated, and the administrator no longer has to be concerned about these messages.
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