• Colocation
• Cloud
• Hosting
• Managed Services
• Development
• Support
• About Us

• Client Login
• Colocation
• Data Backups
• Database
• Domain Names
• Email
• General Setup
• Webmail
• Email Troubleshooting
• Spam Info
• Catch-all Mailboxes
• Email Phishing
• Name Space Mining
• Spam Filters
• Forged Email / SPF Information
• CAN-SPAM Act
• Client TOS Notification
• FAQs
• FTP
• Network and Connectivity
• SSL Certificates
• Statistics
• FAQs

Support - Name Space Mining

Namespace mining is a principal method spammers use for coming up with lists of e-mail addresses. It uses an automated program to generate likely addresses that can be spammed, e.g., james@adhost.com, jamie@adhost.com and jose@adhost.com.

At Adhost, large numbers of e-mails received in alphabetical order are flagged, and if many of them are found to be sent to e-mail addresses that do not exist, then the entire batch is considered an attempt at namespace mining. Once namespace mining is detected from an IP address, then everything from that IP address can be blocked.

We wrote our own mining blocker because we were unable to find a publicly available namespace mining blocker. Adhost's mining blocker only blocks an IP address for a limited time of 2 to 4 hours, and then the block expires. The idea behind this is to discourage the interest of miners. Using this monitoring, Adhost does stop dictionary attacks in their tracks so our mail users will receive even less spam.

There is also a small caveat, even if the person was sending to a legitimate address, they can still receive this error. Why that happens is because the IP is a dynamic IP address therefore someone before your person from domain.org sent the email message had that address when they connected to the Internet.

What to Do If Your E-Mail Is Blocked

If you find that your e-mail is blocked by namespace mining, it will automatically unblock after 4 hours. Otherwise, there are procedures in which you can act upon to be unblocked from namespace mining as well as prevent the situation from happening. These procedures are as follows, but not necessarily in order:

• If you are blocked by namespace mining, you can call Adhost support and request us to unblock you.
• To prevent namespace mining you should keep your e-mail recipients list up-to-date and make sure all addresses are valid.

Keep in mind that it may not be anyone on your domain that caused the namespace mining. It could just be someone who is in contact but not directly associated with the company. There is no true way to protect yourself from being blocked by namespace mining, but even the smallest effort will help.