Mail service go poof

Annoying; my main email host suddenly decided to ignore the catch-all email address and so all mail to it started bouncing.

The catch-all address had been a mixed blessing in the past month or two, with dictionary attacks flooding the place with spam; however, it had been useful to send all mail to a script that would filter stuff marked by the SpamAssassin that the host automatically sends stuff through to a special box and that would let me configure recipients and filter things more easily; it also let me make up addresses on-the-fly to give to websites, for example.

I've set up workarounds for some of my most-used aliases (including the one that pne@lj forwarded to), but they're not filtered now... meh. And some mail will still get dropped on the floor.

I know that I had been considering dropping the catch-all feature and only configuring specific aliases... but having the forced on me so suddenly was not fun. And I'm a bit wary of having the existing forwarder workarounds configured to filter mail by passing it to a script (by forwarding to |/path/to/script instead of to email.address@example.com), since I'm not sure whether I'll be able to edit or delete such rules later on... the web-based admin console the host uses is badly programmed and doesn't escape regex metacharacters properly, last I checked, so it won't find things containing, say, | or +.

I suppose the real solution would be to get a box of my own, where I can set up Exim (or whatever) in more detail to accept, reject, and filter, but I'm a bit loath of the expense, both in money (for a co-located box, or even a share in a user-mode Linux lace) and the time to admin my own machine. (I'm not even sure I have all the skillset for a mail admin, let alone a general-purpose one.)

Edit Oh hey thar it's started working again. I haev spam again woot. Or something.

Now to consider whether to delete my forwarders again and filter everything through the script behind the catch-all alias. Not now, though.