BV EDIT: It should be worth noting that I used to do it the old way with host files and many domains that I did not like being resolved to 127.0.0.2 (not a typo... will elaborate if you want)
Can you elaborate? I no longer operate a mail server (for over 5 years) because it is too much of a hassle. But 99% of the DNS requests for my domain were for MX records, and in order to cut down on the number of requests, I return 127.0.0.1 with the longest TTL possible. I have no idea if these requests are carryovers from spammers trying to reach very old customer email addresses, or if they are dictionary attacks. This workaround has only been partially successful.
J.A. Coutts
I no longer operate a mail server either. However, I do not have MX records at all, but I do have an SPF record to (hopefully) stop people from sending mail using my domain. I know that is against the RFC, but more on that later.
I used the Windows hosts file to resolve domains that I did not want to browse to, like example.com to 127.0.0.2.
This was due to the fact that 127.0.0.1 "does exist" on the local system (yours) and it would essentially have to time out to continue processing http requests. Firefox has a feature that only allows a certain amount of requests to hit a particular server and, if many requests were sent to that same server, it would slow things down. Again, 127.0.0.2 would immediately dump as not valid and the connection would not be created.
Whether or not this is still a valid reason is not known to me and I have not tested this out in a long time.
