"Catchall" emails

To let them bounce or not

[Laxters]

Is it better to use a catchall email account or let bad emails just bounce back to senders?

I don't know if I'm asking more for a survey than advice, but I am wondering what other people are doing.

Catchalls work great for smaller organizations. I've had success with them in the past. But lately, with all the spam that gets sent to random accounts like "john" or "susie" at yourdomain dot com, I've pretty much convinced myself to just let them bounce.

The only real drawback is that emails to terminated employees will bounce. My hope is that people will be smart enough to look up the new contact or give us a call.

Thanks,

-- Lax

[isitreal]

If you have decent control of your email system, catchalls set to bounce are a great way to massively cut down on spam. On my hoster, you can include a text string on the bounce for the main catchall.

I do some network admin stuff for some companies, what I do when an employee leaves is first forward their old email to a current admin email, then after a few months, I set up a bounce on that email, separate from the catchall email bounce, which includes a link to the contact page of our website.

Obviously, you don't ever want to put an actual email address on the bounce text or that could be extracted by spammers on the off chance there was a real email return address, unlikely, but you never know, so sending them to the contact page will do the job if it's a real inquiry.

[SEOMike]

isitreal has the right choice. That's how we do it.