Domain level email filtering...

[BossHawg]

OK, I'm at wits end with this and it is driving me bonkers. My domain, cyberguyz.org, has about 10 email accounts defined for it. Lately it seems some spambot has gotten ahold of my domain and is making email addresses like lkjus@cyberguyz.org or ysytw@cyberguyz.org. Of course places with spam blocking will reject the amails and it gets bounced back to my default account.

I have tried just about freaking everything to fix this issue from removing the default account for my domain (does not work because it kills my main accounts too), to using boxtrapper.

My main question is this: Is there a way to force delivery of mail ONLY to my defined email addresses and reject everything else?

Any ideas/clues on how to deal with this are welcome.

[Early Out]

Login to the control panel, choose Email Manager, Default Address, and set it to ":fail: No Such User Here." That will dump any message that's addressed to anything other than your defined accounts.

[BossHawg]

That was the first thing I've tried. It also dumps anything that comes in for my main domain account's email too (definitely not a good thing!).

For some odd reason it refuses to route my main domain email account's mail if I put :fail: flag in. Very frustrating!

[Early Out]

That was the first thing I've tried. It also dumps anything that comes in for my main domain account's email too (definitely not a good thing!).That's very weird. In theory, the default address setting should only apply to unrouted email, i.e., email that's addressed to your domain, but not to any existing POP account within that domain. And that's certainly the way it works with mine. Hmmmm.....

Edit: Upon experimenting, I've discovered something odd, something I never noticed before. I can't actually send mail to mydomain@mydomain.com (using my real domain, of course). It produces a failure that indicates that the recipient can't be identified, i.e., a "fail!" When I set up my domain, I established a POP email account that I use for everything, but it's not my "main" account name, but something like me@mydomain.com. There's something fundamentally different about that "main" account, the one that's based purely on your domain name.

[Karlos2121]

OK, I'm at wits end with this and it is driving me bonkers. My domain, cyberguyz.org, has about 10 email accounts defined for it. Lately it seems some spambot has gotten ahold of my domain and is making email addresses like lkjus@cyberguyz.org or ysytw@cyberguyz.org. Of course places with spam blocking will reject the amails and it gets bounced back to my default account.

I have tried just about freaking everything to fix this issue from removing the default account for my domain (does not work because it kills my main accounts too), to using boxtrapper.

My main question is this: Is there a way to force delivery of mail ONLY to my defined email addresses and reject everything else?

Any ideas/clues on how to deal with this are welcome.
We had that problem on the old server. All of the xyz@domain.com was being sent to the "user42x@domain.com" (admin act). Since I check the admin via entourage i always had about 400 of those junkers on monday mornings.

Bluehost has been better since the default deletes those emails that don't have a box. We still get spam, but at least it's sent to a real email account, and spam assassin helps, although in the last few days the spam content that slips through has been larger than the 1 or 2 a day (now up to 10-15 for me, the owner gets waaay more).

Sorry if my post is a bit confusing, i'm still learning about all this email setup stuff (we used to hire it out, now i get to learn it).

[kaskudoo]

we definetly get more spam than before .... i used to have 120 spam emails a week .... we are beyond 400 now (since a few weeks at bluehost)

i will read with interest about spam blocking techniques .... although my email program is fairly good about it so far (96% accuracy)

[BossHawg]

The majority of htese seem to be bounce-backs from failed email attempts. I've changed the emailers in VBulletin and Joomla! to use my SMTP rather than the standard php mail() function just in case some spambot code got dropped on my domain (lord knows how http://www.pcpowerpig.com/forums/images/smilies/shifty.gif).

In any case i hate having to sit thru my email program downlaoding dozens of these things from bogus email addresses based on my domain.

[icedancer]

We have had the same problem as Karlos2121 over the past few weeks. Loads of bounced back failed messages from random generated email addresses on our primary website (not the main BH Account).

A ticket to BH has produced no response.

Anyone have any idea how these spammers can send emails with our account addresss? Is it just a website scavenging thing or are they able someway to send them through our accounts?

Either way it seems possible that our sites may become blocked by anti-spam features. Is there a way to stop the spammers?

[Early Out]

Anyone have any idea how these spammers can send emails with our account addresss? Is it just a website scavenging thing...Sending out an email with someone else's FROM address on it is no more difficult than sending out a piece of snail mail with someone else's return address printed in the upper left corner of the envelope. I could send you an email that appeared to come from george.bush@whitehouse.gov.

So, your address has simply been scavanged from somewhere. Since our domain names are all published (they have to be, or DNS wouldn't work!), it's very easy for spammers to make up addresses using those real domain names.

[BossHawg]

OK I think I have worked out a method of keeping the crap out of my incoming mail in my admin mail id. It is a little roundabout but here is how it works:

1. Created a new email address called 'filtered@mydomain.com' and set it's quota nice & high.

2. Created a forwarder that will forward all mail addressed to my admin account to the 'filtered' account.

3. Changed my POP settings in my email program to log on using the filtered%mydomain.com user id and password.

4. Set the aging for my admin email account to 1 day which will clear out anything that gets left behind.

What this appears to be doing is moving email that is explicitly to my admin accoount to the new filtered account. This leaves behind the mail arriving for the undefined email accounts sitting in my admin account. By setting the aging of the admin account's mail to the minimum (1 day), the crap that is left behind gets automagically cleaned out.

I still get spam showing up at my admin account, and AFAIK there is no way of totally killing that, but now instead of getting 60+ spam emails/day I am now getting about 5.

Thanks for all the responses! I hope my solution above helps you out as well.