10,000 Spam a Day Sucks! Stop Email Spam. Fix Your Website Setup.

For the last few months, I had been getting more than 10,000 emails a day. 200 - 300 of these I actually needed to read. The rest were old fashioned spam. As strange as it seems, the increase had been so gradual, I really hadn't even noticed.

Granted, if you are used to getting 100 emails a day and you wake up the next morning to find 10,000, you can't miss that. But a year ago, I was getting 500 - 1,000 emails a day. Each week the number increased slightly. Then a year later, it's over 10,000.

Once my mail server started crashing from the bulk of it, I had to find a solution. The fix was simple. My problem was solved by simply turning off the catch all in my cpanel setup.

When I setup a new site, I always enable the catch all email account. This has been standard practice for me since I started setting up sites 10 years ago.

What is a catch all email address?

A catch all is simply a way to catch all email that is sent to a domain even if the email address doesn't exist.

Say you just purchase the domain name mydomain.com. On your server you setup only one email address yourname@mydomain.com. Now if your catch all were off and someone were to send email to postmaster@mydomain.com, the email would return to them undeliverable because that address doesn't exist.

But if you had your catch all enabled, it would catch and forward all email sent to mydomain.com even if the email address didn't exist. So for example, anything_you_want_here@mydomain.com would be delivered with no problem.

The thing I noticed about all the spam I was getting was it was being sent to email addresses that didn't exist and was being caught and forwarded by the catch all. Once the catch all was off, my problem was solved. I am back down to less than 500 email a day.

95% of the spam I was getting was coming through email addresses that didn't really exist.

Posted by: Brent Crouch on 31 Mar, 2008No Comments »