Comments on: Trying to Leave Catch-All E-Mail Behind

By: Recette cake

Recette cake — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:41:23 +0000

Thx for this article.

By: whois

whois — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:34:05 +0000

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By: Parier Rugby

Parier Rugby — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:20:05 +0000

Merci, article fort interressant.

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By: Lou Johnson

Lou Johnson — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 22:14:33 +0000

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By: Dotan Cohen

Dotan Cohen — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:09:40 +0000

I also use a catchall email address in the same fashion that you mention. This Thunderbird extension makes it easy:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/594

There are two open Kmail bugs for making this possible in Kmail:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72926
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159251

You might want to vote for those bugs.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:32:16 +0000

You can do custom NDR mails, so if someone gets a 550 (no such user) when trying to mail you, your personalized NDR message says “This address is no good, use this other one instead”. Make it look as little like a standard bounce as possible, and as much like a personal note as you can.

Anyone who’s an actual person that really wants to mail you should get the message, and any spambots won’t care one way or the other, so you’re not really exposing yourself to more spam harvesting.

Since you’ve had your current domain for a while, you probably get a respectable amount of spam daily to begin with, so I should think you already have a method of dealing with it. As a side note, I’d probably just leave the per-site addresses alone, especially if there are too many to remember. It makes it super easy to filter for spam to those addresses (if recipient = nike@domain.com and sender does not contain nike.com, delete it), I really sort of wish I’d been doing that myself all these years.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:10:42 +0000

First, fix your From: headers so that replies always go to the correct address.

Since you’re forwarding all this stuff to Gmail, create a filter that catches all mail sent to yourdomain.com but NOT to your_real_address@yourdomain.com. Set that filter to apply a “Catchall” label. Apply that filter to all previous messasges as well. Then at the very least you can simplify your python script to only consider this one label.

In the future, every time a new mail gets the Catchall label, handle it as you please. Keep an eye on the label and eventually, the catchall emails should dwindle to nothing, at which point you can disable your catchall and delete the label and filter from Gmail.

By: Jason Donenfeld

Jason Donenfeld — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:08:06 +0000

Thanks a lot for your suggestions, Josh. Actually number 2 should be the easiest, because using the data from that python script I can more or less automate the process. It’ll just be a matter of filtering out the non-human email recipients, which will take some work for sure. What I’m most worried about is number number 3. I hate to have stale accounts.

By: Josh BA

Josh BA — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:54:19 +0000

Here’s what I would do:

1)From now on, only give the single address you want to keep to new people and sites.

2)Send notifications to the actual people about the address change. (this is probably the most tedious part)

3)Change the e-mail address at the sites you care about getting more mail from or need the login for. “Need” meaning that signing up a new account if you find out you need to use the service would result is lesser service than keeping that account (something like slashdot or ebay which keeps track of reputation or which you build one like a forum). Otherwise, just create a new account when you find need to with your new address.

4)Set it so that your “from” e-mail address is always the new single one, even when replying to messages sent to a different address. This will make it easier to keep threads going as then no-one will need to manually fix the “reply to” field.

5)Every time you get a message to an address you want to get rid of (any other than your new consolidated one) from an actual person, remind the person to use the new address.

It means keeping the catch-all for a while longer, but eventually the only things being sent to your non consolidated address will be things you don’t care about and the work will be, for the most part, spread out so you don’t have to both do everything at once, and expect others to fix their behavior immediately.