4 ms·
This is a good way to get a ton of spam from bots who try every word @yourdomain
by Vixel 6y ago
This is a good way to get a ton of spam from bots who try every word @yourdomain
- fartcannon 6y agoYou can still have spam filters and block lists.
- slightwinder 6y agoI'm use a catchall-domain for 10 years or so, never got any botspam like that. Only think I got sometimes was spam to info@domain, and this can be easily ignored. Do those bots really exist? I would think the TLD I use is just not interessting enough for them, but it's from a big country.
- megous 6y agoYes, they did exist. I stopped using catchall because of them. It's not as common these days, looking at my postfix log. Though some large spammers were shut down a few years ago. I saw a sharp 60-70% drop in spam volume when that happened. So maybe someone who was doing this dictionary search gave up or was shutdown too in recent past.
- bartvk 6y agoI have this regularly. My catch all gets emails from a bot that tries common first names at my domain, but sometimes really weird ones as well, seemingly random such as a23ssaaaa@example.com
- giaour 6y agoI like the way Fastmail handles this. Your normal email is user@domain.tld, and you can configure the service to also treat emails to <anything>@user.domain.tld as having been sent to you. I have never seen bots try random addresses on a subdomain.
- robinhood 6y agoThis is exactly how I use Fastmail. Every newsletter/new account has a dedicated email address that is an alias to my primary fastmail address, based on a custom combination. That way, it’s super easy to know which service is actually either spamming me, or leaked my email address.
- newuser12345 6y agoHow do you configure this? I assume I need to create a catch-all alias for this to work. I added *@domain.tld but when I send an email to test@user.domain.tld, it bounces.
- jamesboehmer 6y agoDo people not already get their primary inboxes flooded with spam anyway? I've found my email provider's spam filtering pretty good anyway, it hasn't been an issue.
- tatersolid 6y agoThe age of your email address is a big factor. Both my work and personal (custom domain) addresses have been active for over 20 years. I’d say 85-90 percent of what I get in my inbox is spam, despite Google and Microsoft “ML filters” in place. Most of this is “tech salesperson” spam or corporate newsletter type stuff. But they bought my email address, and are sending unsolicited mail, so I report it all hoping to harm their reputation with Google and Microsoft.
- neogodless 6y agoThis is an interesting reminder... I've been using catch-all on @mydomain for at least 15 years, and I went through a phase where I'd get a lot of random strings @mydomain. I set up dummy honeypot@mydomain accounts and added a lot of crap as aliases so they'd get tucked away in a disabled account. (I also do that with any "valid" email addresses that start to get spam.) It was a pain in the butt, but it also stopped quite a while ago. With newer domains, I tend to see stupid common ones like "info", "postmaster", etc. getting spam, but haven't seen the random gibberish ones.