Is A Catch-All Address Worth The Spam?

wildzeke writes "I plan on switching Internet providers this summer to get a faster speed. Since losing an email account is the biggest pain when switching providers, I decided to pay the extra money to have email for the domain I registered. One of the options provided is to make one of your email accounts a catch-all account. In other words, any email sent to this domain with out a valid user name, will be dumped in the catch-all account. The question I have, is this a good idea or not? On one hand, it may catch important email such as admin, or postmaster or simply mis-typed user name. On the other hand, the catch-all will open the flood gates to spam who will send to [all user names in the world]@domain.com."

Comments

Re:No big problems here

[killjoe]

"Yes the RFCs do require a human to read the mail to abuse and postmaster."

Wow. Who is going to come over to my place and watch to make sure I read all that email? How does rfc-ignorant determine the violators of that requirement and blacklist them? Ooops maybe they are not that much of a stickler for standards. Maybe they just blacklist people who violate some parts of the standard and not others.

"You're asking people to DoS someone else."

No I am not. rfc-ignorant is blacklisting people for having that email address active. In that case it's their responsibility to stop spam from coming those addresses. I am simply forwarding the email to them so that they can contact the spammers and have them stop sending spam to my postmaster address.

"You're asking people to shoot at someone."

Wow. I didn't know forwarding email was the same thing as murder. Amazing.

"You're asking people to trespass on someone's property."

Wow. I didn't know forwarding email was the same as trespassing. Isn't forwarding in some RFC or something?

"You're asking people to cause physical harm to someone."

Wow. I didn't know forwarding email actually caused physical harm to anybody.

"See how it parallels?"

I guess I don't. You think forwarding email is the same as murdering somebody. I really don't think it is.

"I gaurantee you if Exodus, Spring, or MCI terminated their postmaster or abuse addresses they would find themselves at the brunt of a negative PR campaign the likes of which you only see elsewhere during presidential campaign years."

First of all BULLSHIT. Second of all they have the resouces to deal with billions of spam they get.

"They would also find themselves on blacklists for choosing to not play by community standards and established rules."

The rules are stupid. They rules were written before spam was invented. The rules need to be changed. This is not the bible, this is not the constitution. It's a stupid fucking RFC. Change the fucking thing to reflect the reality of what is going on in the ground.

"Is it unreasonable to ask you to as well? "

I submit that it is indeed unreasonable. Unless you want to take responsiblity of eliminating spam from my postmaster account and making sure only legitemate emails arrive there don't make me turn it on. If you force me to turn it on then I will be happy to forward them to you so that you can deal with it.

It isn't that complex of an issue.