Black hole

Here's how dumb I've been about my email. And it only occurred to me when I was explaining something to one of my clients. She got locked out of her domain because her email inbox at the domain got filled up with several hundred MB of spam and she didn't know it. Not surprising, because what happens with spam now is that no one even cares if they're sending to legitimate addresses, they just make them up and figure, I guess, that they'll hit one out of a hundred or something. Like, with me, I'm the only email address at this domain. But I've been getting around 1,000 email messages a day, most of them addressed to addresses like "joe@willa.com," "ed@willa.com," like that.

I have filters in my email application (Entourage) to catch everything that isn't addressed specifically to me and throw it away, but I still have to download it all, and if I don't check it for a few days, like if I'm out of town, it's a HUGE amount of junk.

So that's what was happening with my client, and I talked to her ISP and he told me what to change in her control panel to fix it -- she didn't use the main, "catchall" address, so we just put a blank space in that field, and that results in all of that mail being thrown away before it reaches her mailbox.

My problem (I thought) was that when my hosting company set up my account, they set the "main," or "catchall" email address to be my own. So I didn't know of any way to get my own, and just my own, mail, and not have to deal with the rest of it (my previous hosting company had set my main address to be "willac," so I could differentiate between that, which caught the spam, and my own, regular, address). But I got curious, and I poked around in my own control panel, and discovered a mailbox called something like "domain black hole."

I called my hosting company and clarified what it sounded like to me. I asked, if I set the catchall to the "black hole," will I still get all the email addressed specifically to me, but nothing else? And they said that yes, that was the case.

So I did it. And this morning when I got up, instead of having about 500 emails come in overnight, I think there were 30. Only about a half dozen of those were "real," of course, but what a difference! I felt dumb. But glad I figured it out, finally. The filters still catch obvious spam ones that come addressed to me and stick them in a junk mail folder for me to deal with later, but it certainly will make going on vacation less worrisome, knowing that I won't be coming home to 10,000 messages, like I did when we came back from Florida in December.