Email & the black hole question

reading from a link posted here some time back re setting up a redirect for Spam & i'm slightly confused.

Quote from the page as follows

"If one of your mailboxes is being bombarded with spam emails, why not set up a re-direct so that you can send all this spam to a 'black hole'? Any email sent to the mailbox will be re-directed to the black hole and deleted, cutting down the time you waste trawling through spam email.

Setting up a redirect to the black hole

Go to Email Settings > Configure Mailboxes at the Member Centre.
Click 'Add re-direct'.
Enter the Mailbox address that you want to block in the box marked To:address.
Enter [email protected] in the box marked 'Destination address'."

Ok, all very straight forward, yes, that is until you actualy try this, because the page itself says

"This is the email address the sender chooses in the To: field of their email software
It must have at least 3 characters
It cannot be the same as a current mailbox on your account
Allowed characters are: letters (a-z) and numbers (0-9)

The top line of the second paragraph contradicts the third and forth line of the first paragraph.

So are you supposed to enter the senders address, or are you supposed to enter the address that the sender is sending to, which would be my address, if thats the case all mail would get blocked, but on trying the senders addres i get the following.

"he name you have chosen contains one or more illegal characters. Spaces (whitespace) are not allowed. Allowed characters are: letters, numbers, and ".@!_-" ."

errrr no, i've back spaced, deleted and god knows what, so there are no spaces and no ilgeal chars

Any thoghts please

If i kept recieving spam being sent to

[email protected]

Then all i would do is go to the mail box settings and add a forward
the details i would add would be
[email protected]

forward to [email protected]

I'm not sure I quite followed what you said but, in simple terms:

1. Existing mailbox getting spam: my-mail-box (say)
2. Delete my-mail-box
3. Create redirect my-mail-box
4. The redirect address for the redirected mailbox is [email protected]

if spam is being sent to random mailboxes:

1. Do as above, but for the catch-all (default) mailbox
2. Create individual malboxes for each of your wanted mailboxes (including postmaster)
[you may need to do 2 before 1, I can't quite remember]

Create your individual mailboxes then raise a question asking PN to blackhole your default mailbox.