Catch All Issue
- Thread starter shamrox
- Start date
Copy of my response to the ticket (for reference of others)
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A few reasons why we disabled catch-alls:
1. They are a sure invitation to spam. In this case spammers don't need to know a valid email address, but just the domain name.
2. They help spamming, as they negate the effect of an anti-spam technique known as sender verification.
This cause more spam around and most of if it under fake sender name. Thus creating possibility of domain blacklisting.
3. They invite spam backscatter. In simple terms they collect bounces of all emails send under your domain name by spammers.
SPF or no other technique is a solution to it as there is still no uniform standard followed by all emailservers that can prevent email spoofing.
4. In multiple cases they have eaten up huge amount of bandwidth just because the customer had catch-all enabled and was being heavily spammed or huge number of emails bounced that were spoofed under their domain name.
Some customers received 200-300 email per hour in form of bounces.
5. They can clog email server queue when setup as a forward because the recipient email server may have greylisting or SMTP delay or have throttle on messages that can be received by user in a limited time frame (like done by gmail).
These are some of the major issues and it has hit most of the hosts quite hard.
This can be estimated with the fact that Psoft (developers of Hsphere) had to release 3 different options at different levels just to disable catch-all mailboxes.
If this task have enough value for you, you can consider a low end Windows VPS plan (with Plesk) that will you to do this or other things that you don't see possible in shared hosting environment
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A few reasons why we disabled catch-alls:
1. They are a sure invitation to spam. In this case spammers don't need to know a valid email address, but just the domain name.
2. They help spamming, as they negate the effect of an anti-spam technique known as sender verification.
This cause more spam around and most of if it under fake sender name. Thus creating possibility of domain blacklisting.
3. They invite spam backscatter. In simple terms they collect bounces of all emails send under your domain name by spammers.
SPF or no other technique is a solution to it as there is still no uniform standard followed by all emailservers that can prevent email spoofing.
4. In multiple cases they have eaten up huge amount of bandwidth just because the customer had catch-all enabled and was being heavily spammed or huge number of emails bounced that were spoofed under their domain name.
Some customers received 200-300 email per hour in form of bounces.
5. They can clog email server queue when setup as a forward because the recipient email server may have greylisting or SMTP delay or have throttle on messages that can be received by user in a limited time frame (like done by gmail).
These are some of the major issues and it has hit most of the hosts quite hard.
This can be estimated with the fact that Psoft (developers of Hsphere) had to release 3 different options at different levels just to disable catch-all mailboxes.
If this task have enough value for you, you can consider a low end Windows VPS plan (with Plesk) that will you to do this or other things that you don't see possible in shared hosting environment