In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

I use 1and1 for my domains which at the time came with one free email address. Dunno if still does.

I think you mean one mailbox, with unlimited aliases? So an unlimited number of email addresses? Which you sort of confirm with the "*" in your redirect.

it's not unlimited aliases as I can only set one name before the @. I chose a wildcard and it worked.

Hmmm. This page now says 100 aliases. Maybe things have changed?

But it also says it comes with a catch all address.

I signed up with dreamhosts (£10 not too much to lose).

In actual fact (contrary to what they say on another page) they still currently support a catch all address.

I have just reconfigured my Dream-hosting email. There is a default email address and as an experiment I did try sending [email protected] to see if it would catch and deliver. It appeared in the Webmail facility but was not delivered to my mail client, probably because I have it set to send and recieve from [email protected]. So I changed the seting in cPanel in the Default Address section to forward all unrouted mail to mydomain.co.uk to [email protected]. And now it does catch all.

I use my o2 address for a few important things, 2 Yahoo address for other stuff + the three mydomain.co.uk email accounts all through Outlook. Pity that o2 don't have any spam filters. At least with Dream-hosting there is Spam Assassin and BoxTrapper. Be nice if all my email, o2, Yahoo as well as mydomain mail could be routed through these.

Indeed it does. I signed up to Dreamhosting and there was a page saying that catchall was no longer supported. I went into cPanel and in fact it is still supported, as I confirmed by a trial. Perhaps the page I saw was old as I swear the news section of the site has nothing later than 2004.

Thanks for all the input guys. Plenty to chew over there. My domains are registered with UK2 who use to do free catch-all forwarding but stopped it a few years back unless you pay a hefty amount which is the point at which I switched to using my friend's mail server for forwarding.

It is curious that a feature which allows a user to take better control over their own handling of spam is removed in the name of better spam handling.

Edited by gomezz (Tue 17-Mar-09 08:53:01)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I have a rule on the primary mail server that deletes anything that doesn't match my templates. So although I have a catch-all, random junk is going to be silently deleted. Would it be better to bounce it instead?

As 99% of return addresses on spam are spoofed all that bouncing spam does is pass it back to the victim who's email addess is being used. Better to just drop it IMO.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

It is curious that a feature which allows a user to take better control over their own handling of spam is removed in the name of better spam handling.

If you started receiving spam bounces supposedly sent by a randomly generated name @oneofyourdomains.com then you maybe wouldn't be so fond of catch all.

I have the option of catchall but have opted for named mailboxes and just drop everything incorrectly addressed.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 17-Mar-09 08:59:49)

I filter the spam server-side (using Mailwasher rules) so this have never been a problem for me.