Mail service go poof

[pne]

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.

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

If you have any future problems with your mail host, you could transfer it to my server - that's got spamassassin on and is pretty good at catching spam (I get maybe one a week that it doesn't pick up and then I just alter the rules to make sure it gets that next time). The only problem I've found is that AOL have a policy of not accepting mail sent from private mailservers, but on the rare occasion I need to send email to people on AOL, I just use my ISP's SMTP server.

[pne.livejournal.com]

If you have any future problems with your mail host, you could transfer it to my server

Thanks for the offer!

I'll keep it in mind, and possibly see whether it's even possible -- the mail domain in question is newton.digitalspace.net, i.e. a subdomain, and I'm not sure whether they'd delegate a subdomain to someone else's server or let me put in MX records for a different host.

(Again, some decisions come back to bite me -- using that was cheaper since I didn't have to register a domain, but it'll probably be nearly impossible to migrate if I should decide to change web hosters.)

that's got spamassassin on and is pretty good at catching spam (I get maybe one a week that it doesn't pick up and then I just alter the rules to make sure it gets that next time)

That sounds good. I have no idea whether it's possible to train the SpamAssassin config that digitalspace.net uses.

The only problem I've found is that AOL have a policy of not accepting mail sent from private mailservers, but on the rare occasion I need to send email to people on AOL, I just use my ISP's SMTP server.

Ah -- I'd only need a place to receive (and relay to me) emails; I send emails using my ISP's SMTP server already when I'm not using webmail.