The problems with catch-all email
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Catch-all email may sound like a great way to setup your email - but in practice, it’s almost guaranteed to give you problems.
At first glance - the ability to setup your email to allow everything@yourdomain.com to be received to your inbox sounds great - especially if you’re trying to promote yourself as being bigger than you actually are. Once setup, you can simply promote sales@ info@ support@ anythingyoulike@ addresses, all handled in exactly the same way by your default email account.
The main problem with catch-all email is spam. Unfortunately Spam Email isn’t going away - it’s continually on the rise, and the methods spammers use get more elaborate and harder to tackle. By allowing email to anything@yourdomain, you are inviting a spammer to bombard you with email. Dictionary attacks (whereby the spammer sends 1000’s of email to randomwords@yourdomain) are common, and with a catch-all email setup - each of spam these emails will be delivered to you.
The end result is not only a LOT of unnecessary spam email to go through and delete from your inbox, but the potential for your web hosting account to run out of available web-space. Emails take up space, and it doesn’t take too many spam emails (especially if the mailbox you’re directing them to isn’t regularly checked) to consume 100’s of MB. Far too often we see “help I’ve run out of webspace” support tickets, caused simply by spam email to a default (catch-all) email account.
The other common occurrence that we see is regarding Spoofed emails. Again, sad but true - it’s common to have your domain name spoofed by a spammer. Email spoofingis the practice of changing your name in email so that it looks like the email came from somewhere or someone else. This isn’t too much of an issue itself (technically, the emails are NOT sent by you, or through your account - and this is easily proved by examining the email headers), but if a spammer sends out a few thousand emails using a from address of random@yourdomain - you can guarantee that most of these emails will bounce - right back to you - because your catch-all accepts email to random@.
So.. take the time to setup one or more email addresses that you actually use, and make sure you disable catch-all email - otherwise, sit back and enjoy the spam.
