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n5bb · 15 Mar 2023, 04:29 AM

I have had a similar experience to Hadaso with my personal domain hosted at Fastmail. Although I occasionally receive fake “we have obtained control over your account” phishing scam messages sent to administrative addresses, these are nearly always caught by the Fastmail spam filter. Of course, I can’t block the administrative addresses, since all domains SHOULD read messages sent to those addresses as specified by the ICANN rules for domains. Nearly all the random junk I receive to odd addresses is sent to “foo” or similar well-known aliases which I happen to control at my domain or Fastmail owned domains. Years ago I noticed some dictionary spam (random words used as the username at my domain), but these are very rare now.

Most unresolved messages caught by my catchall alias acceptance seem to be due to mistakes by others. My personal domain is “.NET” and there is a university and private company in the UK with my name at other TLD’s (such as .COM or .EDU). So people accidentally enter my .NET domain on a form or other communication, and I start getting messages from a university intended for a student or I get inserted into a random email thread because of such a mistake. In most cases I am unable to get the university (or others) to remove my address, so I eventually block that one address for a while (as Hadaso described).

I just realized that the current Fastmail setup screens allow me to file received messages sent to addresses caught by the catchall (but not with a specific alias I created) to a folder. So I just created a “wildcard” folder/label and will see how many messages actually arrive based on my domain wildcard. But spam and other rejection rules might prevent some of those from arriving, so I may go back and try disabling all rules (and custom sieve) which blocks certain addresses.

This is a topic which is very dependent on personal experience. As Hadaso points out, since Fastmail users can block a specific address at the SMTP stage (accepting the email at the incoming server) and also via sieve rules (automatically or manually written), we can rather easily block spammers who pick on certain addresses.

Bill

15 Mar 2023, 04:29 AM	#7
n5bb Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: May 2004 Location: Irving, Texas Posts: 8,930	Experience with personal domain catchall aliases I have had a similar experience to Hadaso with my personal domain hosted at Fastmail. Although I occasionally receive fake “we have obtained control over your account” phishing scam messages sent to administrative addresses, these are nearly always caught by the Fastmail spam filter. Of course, I can’t block the administrative addresses, since all domains SHOULD read messages sent to those addresses as specified by the ICANN rules for domains. Nearly all the random junk I receive to odd addresses is sent to “foo” or similar well-known aliases which I happen to control at my domain or Fastmail owned domains. Years ago I noticed some dictionary spam (random words used as the username at my domain), but these are very rare now. Most unresolved messages caught by my catchall alias acceptance seem to be due to mistakes by others. My personal domain is “.NET” and there is a university and private company in the UK with my name at other TLD’s (such as .COM or .EDU). So people accidentally enter my .NET domain on a form or other communication, and I start getting messages from a university intended for a student or I get inserted into a random email thread because of such a mistake. In most cases I am unable to get the university (or others) to remove my address, so I eventually block that one address for a while (as Hadaso described). I just realized that the current Fastmail setup screens allow me to file received messages sent to addresses caught by the catchall (but not with a specific alias I created) to a folder. So I just created a “wildcard” folder/label and will see how many messages actually arrive based on my domain wildcard. But spam and other rejection rules might prevent some of those from arriving, so I may go back and try disabling all rules (and custom sieve) which blocks certain addresses. This is a topic which is very dependent on personal experience. As Hadaso points out, since Fastmail users can block a specific address at the SMTP stage (accepting the email at the incoming server) and also via sieve rules (automatically or manually written), we can rather easily block spammers who pick on certain addresses. Bill