Catchall Emails

[lnxcode]

Another very very popular question that we seem to get asked a lot is: do we support catch all email addresses and if not, why?

The catchall email address is the most horrid form of email you can think of. This is where all the spammers say... aha! we've found gold. 128@N1mm.domain.com can be spamed and no matter what you put it will always accept.

So they flood the servers with bogus email, eating up CPU and memory time (which then crashes the mail server and etc..)

So the above is why we don't support catch-all address's....sorry guys...

[Scott]

Denis, you missed another key issue. Catch-alls will hog the server to the point where the server will actually begin bouncing the email back to sender as undeliverable.

Spammers exploit this by using fake headers so that your server actually sends the spam messages to 3rd party email addresses. These emails then get reported as spam to popular spam databases and your server / website / IP will end up on blacklists.

I know all of this because it happened to me on a catch-all I forgot to turn off. Catch-all's are a really bad idea to have enabled by any host as default. I had to spend a week emailing blacklist databases like Spamcop to tell them I fixed the issue and turned off the catch-all. I haven't used a catch-all since.

[james]

I agree with you Dennis... its a nice and sweet way for those spammers out there to celebrate ..... good move.....

[Mel]

If anyone has some time, could you explain why a catch-all email is so good for spammers? I understand that it allows them to send email to any address they can make up, but what is the point? All the mail ends up with just one person. So they have slowed down someone's server and filled someone's mail box, aren't they trying to sell viagra?

[lnxcode]

Originally Posted by Mel

If anyone has some time, could you explain why a catch-all email is so good for spammers? I understand that it allows them to send email to any address they can make up, but what is the point? All the mail ends up with just one person. So they have slowed down someone's server and filled someone's mail box, aren't they trying to sell viagra?

Well a cathcall accepts:

*@yourdoamin.com

Which means that anyone that sends anything even: asdasdad21d12mdn1@yourdomain.com or
%swannsdn23@yourdomain.com

your server will accept. Which means that ******, spam, porn, c alias, etc... will be accepted and if you have a forwarder... its a whole big mess again. Not to mention that the load is about 2 - 4 times higher then it is now at the highest point...

Basically, its not a good idea at all, hurts more then it fixes.