Spam emails using my domain name

riley

Perch
The catchall mailbox for one of my domains received more than 600 undeliverable mail messages this morning. The emails contained some stupid sales pitch for buying pills online and included a link to some website in China. The IP addresses associated with the original emails were in Latin America and Asia and the emails were likely sent via whatever open relays these idiots could find. They are simply using my domain name in the From and ReplyTo fields with a made up name and username (for example: <"John Doe" [email protected]>).

I assume that since it's impossible to keep these idiots from putting whatever they please into the From and ReplyTo fields, there isn’t much I can do but set up filters in my email client to put these email failure messages in the trash. Or am I wrong? Do you (can you) guys do anything to pursue/shut down the offenders? I can send you the information, but it is not as if there is a great level of cooperation between various governments and foreign hosts when it comes to putting these idiots out of business.

riley
 
In nutshell, this is one of the major reason why we don't support catch-all mailboxes on shared and reseller hosting anymore
 
In nutshell, this is one of the major reason why we don't support catch-all mailboxes on shared and reseller hosting anymore

I was not aware that you no longer support them, although I do understand why. For now, it seems that previously established catch-all mailboxes continue to work, but will that end at some point in the future?

riley
 
I was not aware that you no longer support them, although I do understand why. For now, it seems that previously established catch-all mailboxes continue to work, but will that end at some point in the future?

No. Not unless they affect mailserver performance in any way.
In other words, they can only be disabled case-to-case basis.
And they sure can be pretty harmful(fill up mailserver queue with spam and bounces, eat your allocated bandwidth in no time, waste your time sorting mails, etc), just not worth the pain in normal course.
 
The catch-all has no effect on a spammer using your domain/email address, though, correct?

Correct. It simply allows your domain to recieve all of the delivery failure notices, even though the spammer used an email address that doesn't exist. This can load up the catchall mailbox and increase traffic.

riley
 
Correct. It simply allows your domain to recieve all of the delivery failure notices, even though the spammer used an email address that doesn't exist. This can load up the catchall mailbox and increase traffic.

riley

Right. I just wanted it to be clear that the catchall was not the cause of the spamming, which to me seemed to the the support question at hand.
 
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