I have a personal domain which I use for email and since it’s just me, I’ve always used a catch-all mailbox with different usernames for different websites, etc. (eg. I might use sitepoint@domain.com).
While this works I get a huge amount of spam to random addresses, both predictable things like accounts@ but also a random string of letters and numbers @domain.com. My spam filter (MailScanner) does a good job of filtering these but can often get clogged up. For example, yesterday afternoon there were over 8000 emails in the Pending queue and Mailscanner was struggling to keep up so I manually deleted most of them.
So my question is: if I switch to using a single mailbox and set up aliases for my main alternative addresses, and reject all other mail, will that help reduce the workload on the server?
Yes, I believe it would, as that closely mimics the setup I use and then I simply have to deal with the spam on the email accounts I actually do have as “active”. Anything sent outside of that account and its aliases are thrown into a catchall that simply go to /dev/null never to be seen again.
That’s great, thanks. In cPanel the two relevant options are:
Discard the email while your server processes it by SMTP time with an error message.
Discard
Ideally I’d like the messages to be rejected in the hope that my server won’t continue to be bombarded but I don’t want it sending bounce emails back as the From/Reply-to addresses are going to be fake. Would the first option work or would it just create more traffic?