3 email related questions

[baboo]

I am a cpanel user, not admin. I am having a high CPU usage problem with the huge amount of spam mails coming in to my domain name.

Assuming the amount of incoming emails is the sole reason for the high CPU load and no other email filtering tool is in-use. There are about 30,000 spams incoming to this domain name every day. 99.5% of the spams are sent to non-existent aliases.

I have ~100 forwarding addresses setup, all to one email account of the same domain.
All incoming mails are set to :fail: for non-accounted aliases.

My questions:

Would reduce the number of forwarding aliases to ~10 help to alleviate the server load?

Which takes less hit on the CPU, setting up 10 pop3 accounts or setting up 1 pop3 account and 9 forwarding aliases?

And, is there a performance difference between using ":fail: no such address" and ":fail:"?

Thanks in advance,

[chirpy]

1. Having fewer aliases provides a smaller target for spammers so it may well reduce the amount of spam getting through

2. No difference

3. No difference

One thing to ask your hosting provider to look into is a dictionary attack ACL which is particularly helpful when you have catchall aliases set to :fail:
http://www.configserver.com/free/eximdeny.html

[baboo]

Thanks chirpy,

I'll ask them if they can setup the dictionary attack ACL.