Course, it has to be said that if I did get a flood of junk come through one night, I could switch off catch-all and the spammers would be clouted with a large amount of suddenly dead addresses, although they'd have to try each one again to learn that they're all non-existent.
If my experience is any guide, spammers do not care in the slightest about bounces. In most cases the mail is being sent by a hijacked server or zombie and the spammer never sees the bounce.
I have email addresses that have been dead for over 5 years and they still get regular doses of spam. (When I switched to SIMS I turned them all into spamtraps.) The idea that spammers "clean" their address lists based on bounces also seems to be false.
Rather than leaving the barn door wide open with a catch-all address, why not use a variation of the wild-card addressing scheme described earlier in this thread? Tell customer "a" that they can use addresses in the form "[EMAIL PROTECTED]", customer "b" that they can use addresses in the form "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" and so on. This gives them an unlimited number of instantly available email addresses while preventing most dictionary attacks (until the spammers read this thread!).
When someone decided to use fake addresses with my domain name in the RETURN-PATH of a spam broadcast, I received thousands of emails from MTAs informing several dozen nonexistent addresses that their mail had bounced. If I had had a catch-all account, all of them would have been delivered, complete with their virus payloads. As it happened, all were rejected during the handshake phase as unknown addresses. That used a lot less of my bandwidth.
Domains in the above examples are provided for amusement only ... ;->
-- Neil
Neil Herber Corporate info at http://www.eton.ca/ Eton Systems, 15 Pinepoint Drive, Nepean, ON, Canada K2H 6B1 Tel: (613) 829-4668
############################################################# This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to the mailing list <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
