i like this idea of using my domain and then using each vendor's name as the specific address @ my domain. that way too, over time i'll start to see who set me up to being receiving all of those ridiculously rude $500 home depot gift certificates etc.

thanks.

Don't you find you get spam to too many different names with a catchall? I discontinued using these a few years ago because it seemed impossible to catch the spam anymore because stuff would get sent to anything and everything at a given domain, and with the catchall, it ALL becomes a valid address. It's just as much of a pain to blackhole all those possibilities as it is to set up aliases for all the addresses you actually want to use.

Honestly, I've been using fewer addresses, not more, and the spam filtering is doing well enough for me. One work address, one main personal address in gmail and even with a couple of really long-time domain addresses forwarded to the gmail the vast majority of the spam goes right into the spam mailbox and I get very few false positives. Same at work now, very rare single spam into my inbox, no false positives. I'm happy enough with that that I don't spend any time trying to blackhole stuff or create multiple aliases or temporary accounts or such.

In my experience, it's just the obvious addresses that get spam, nothing like a dictionary attack. Addresses such as

admin@...
sales@....
jobs@...
info@...
et cetera...

http://www.reflexion.net/index.php

I haven't used it, but the bit that sounds nice is that its service can remember who you gave each "temporary" address to, and auto-reject messages when a new sender uses someone else's temporary address for you.

Bob

Another disadvantage is that some webhosts no longer all catch all addresses.

I'm using fastmail (plus addressing described above) and it works well for me.

I have my domaine at hostgator.com . Its cheap and reliable with unlimited e-mail addresses
Jim

I've been running catch-alls on multiple domains for a few years now, and haven't had too much trouble with spam. Most of my domains get almost no spam at all (at least not that get through my spam filters).

One of my domains used to get a lot of "obvious address" spam like nerd's examples above. Those were easily blackholed and I now get almost none of it.

Another of my domains (the one I use the most) has been trickier to control, because some spammer decided to use randomly generated usernames (vxwed@mydomain, oiuwre@mydomain, etc.) as the "From" addresses on his spam, so I was getting a lot of backscatter (bounced messages that I never sent in the first place). My e-mail provider upgraded their spam filters to provide better filtering of backscatter spam, but a tiny bit still sneaks through in fits and starts. It's not enough to outweigh the usefulness of the catch-all, though, so I'm sticking with it for now.

I've gotten this, too. How do spammers decide what domain to use in a spoofed 'from' address? It can't be related to having a catch-all user at that domain, can it?

I don't think there's any rhyme or reason to how spammers pick their spoofed return addresses.