Excluding catch-alls renders useless

Given that use of catch-alls for sundry email addresses (slashdot@mydomain.org for example) is one of the principal advantages of vanity domains and private hosting, I find it extraordinary that you've disabled spam filtering for catch-alls -- is it somehow more efficient that all the spam 'generated' by a catch-all ends up in my inbox?

yours,

catchalls@djames.org

Ditto. I have the same sort of setup on my domains. I would also like to use the spam filtering.

--Sam

Filtering mail is enormously more computationally expensive than simply delivering it.

And since having a catch-all means that the dictionary attacks spammers constantly aim at domains means you'll be getting an order of magnitude more mail (almost all of it spam) it means we have to devote that much more processing time to filtering your mail.

And while I understand that it's extremely _convenient_ to use a catchall for addresses like slashdot@yourdomain.com, you can create as many aliases as you'd like. You can create one for every site you visit. It's a little annoying when you set them up, but then they work just like your catch-all.

I ditched the catch-all on my personal domain a few months ago, and just created real aliases for every address I actually use. I have a great filter (Spamprobe) so I wasn't getting much spam to my inbox, but the amount of spam I had getting filtered dropped from (no joke) hundreds a day to about 60.

During the earliest beta test of this filter, I was letting people with catch-alls sign up. One guy got more than four thousand messages a day filtered from his inbox. If we had only a few hundred mailboxes (out of the 400,000 we host) get that kind of spam, we'd need more mail filtering machines than web hosting machines.


nate.

You make good points.

Most of the addresses I have registered at sites of the form samg+foobar@unhinged.org. It would be nice if Dreamhost supported plus-style addressing. In this scheme, mail sent to user+stuff@domain gets sent to the mailbox user@domain and you can use the "stuff" string in the address for filtering. This has been around for years; it is currently supported by cyrus and gmail. If Dreamhost supported this feature, I would probably drop my catch-all alias.

--Sam

There's already a thread on this somewhere.

Long story short; Postfix doesn't support this in version 1.x with virtual domains. When we upgrade to Postfix v2, we'll support user+foo or user-foo style addressing.