Cheers for the feedback... this is the situation:
Normally any mail to that account just sits there and I clear them out every so often when I get a-round-tuit.
The e-mail address is shared by the admin account and SMF notifications. SMF needs a email to send out any forum notifications.
SMF also uses it to send out the sign-up authorisation link. Because it sends out (genuine) notifications it has ended up on some spam list or other and does get quite a bit of spam.
However there may be times like the other day when someone was having difficulty signing up, it was useful to look at the account to see why the message had ended up not arriving (in this particular case email had been rejected due to a problem with their account).
It was only because I checked it, that I noticed quite a few of the email responses to PMs... and mentioned it here, because there will be some people wont have gotten replies to PMs.
Currently it should be sending out the following to any incoming mail via an auto-responder.
You just sent email to an unmonitored email address.
This email account is used solely for the purpose of generating automated forum notifications and any incoming mail is deleted.
If you meant to respond to a PM, do not reply to the notification mail, instead you must log in to the forum to reply to Personal Messages.
The other option I have in CPanel is to drop mail with
:fail: No such person at this address
I could blackhole, but that wont advise people that they've responded via email to PM.
Any other suggestions about what I can do? I get what you mean about Backscatter and how that email address could end up Blacklisted... normally I dont bounce spam mails for that reason.