Catchall email should I bother

[Red_Eye]

I am thinking of dropping my catchall email account. There are 2 types of emails that are delivered to it. 1. Genuine emails with a misspelled name.
2. Spam
My question is should I bother? If someone has misspelt a name wouldn't it be better that they know it is wrong and spell it right in the future, and I don't want the spam anyway.
Thanks in advance

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I dropped catch all a few months ago and I am not aware of any adverse effect. I am aware of a reduction in spam. Genuine inquirers will go the extra mile.

[adb64]

I use my catchall email when ordering some stuff at CompanyX. Then I give them [e-mail] as my email address. All replies from them end up in my catch-all box. In case I receive spam addressed at [e-mail] I know from who the spammer has my email address. I blocked mail to common spam addresses like [e-mail], [e-mail] etc.

Arjan

[Red_Eye]

Thanks for the feedback, I think that I will drop the catchall account. I think that the reduction in the level of span will be an advantage.
My main reason for doing this is that I am going to use my exchange server to receive all email rather than my isp's servers. Exchange doesn't support a catchall account, at first I thought that this would be a problem. I have looked at work arounds (there are a few) but then I thought do I really need one? I think the answers is no.

[stapel]

FYI: At one point, my domain was the target of determined dictionary-attack spam. Above ninety percent of this was directed to non-existant addresses.

If "catchall" ("default") hadn't been set to "blackhole" (automatic deletion), I would have been receiving an extra 120K e-mails a day.

Eliz.

[Red_Eye]

stapel,
If I didn't have a catachall account wouldn't this spam bounce off the server?

[stapel]

It'll only bounce if you've set your account to "fail" (or whatever is your server's "bounce" setting). If you change the default for your domain name to "blackhole" (or whatever is your server's "automatic deletion" setting), then nobody sees it and it doesn't go anywhere.

Consult with your host for specifics.

Eliz.

[bill]

A catchall can be very handy as adb64 and I have several domains that I've used like this over the years and I simply can't turn off the catchall. On these domains I've found that a good combination of whitelisting, greylisting and a decent Bayesian filter will keep things safely manageable.

[oneguy]

I do what adb64 does.

If I start getting spam to a particular email address, I know who sold it (which is sometimes useful and mostly not, since It's unlikely I'll spend time trying to do anything about it).

The main reason is that I can just filter it straight to trash once I know what happened.

That's for when I need to give people email addresses for things. Stuff like info@domain or sales@domain are usually already sent straight to trash.