June 27, 2006
142 MB of Spam And I Didnt Have an Email Address
Okay, we all know spam is a problem, but I got a bit of a surprise today. I know that catch-all addresses are havens for spammers because they’ll just email you at support@yoursite.com, admin@yoursite.com and any common name for email addresses.
Well, I didn’t realize that one of my web hosts has the catch-all address set up as a default. So, little did I know that over the past year or so, emails were being accumulated on my server.
Today, I got a notice from my host saying I’d used my nearly 200 MB of space. And I’m thinking - WHAT? I only host HTML pages, some PDFs and have a relatively small database. Well, apparently there was 142 MB of spam being saved on the server because of the catch-all address.
That’s a lot of spam being sent to nobody in particular. Needless to say, I have to go back and remove the catch-alls on all my accounts with them!
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Ack! Thanks for mentioning this. I think this has happened me too. I’m going to fix it now though.
Thanks for the insight. I never would have even thought about this.
UG. Of course. I knew that we had catch-all email accounts set up, but I hadn’t thought to delete them. I’ll definitely go in and disable them.
Alice,
It is crazy the lengths people go to spam. Thanks for the tip. I am going to check my hosting accounts now.
Shannon
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My problem is people scanning my website for contact emails then spamming me! When tracking on statcounter they are usually different countries.. anyone know how to nip this problem? I thought I read somewhere there was a code you could add to avoid this~
thx Melissa
Melissa. I generally don’t put email addresses on websites at all, but here’s some code that is suppose to help:
>Email Encoder
Either use a decoder or a form. I never put my email address (anymore) on my webpages. I usually use a mailform.
I used to have a catch all address and all of those emails, not only spam but also junk came to by in box until I set up a mailwasher. Still it was a problem until I set the mailserver to only allow routed mails (e.g. mails going to an email-address that does exist), which means I have a lot of email accounts. It’s of course a drag if you use up all your space for that kind of junk.
You should be able to set your default account to blackhole. This way, any email that isn’t going to an account you actually have, will get automatically deleted from your server.
Yeah, Michelle. That’s exactly what I did. That host only had catch-alls as a defaul in old hosting accounts and no longer does it. It is definitely not a good idea these days!
Jadzia, those are great spam tips, but that’s not how they created the spam to the catch-all.
No kidding…really? I have a bunch of catch all emails… eeeek!
Thanks for the tip!
Annette