The failure of catchall email addresses

For years when I ran my own server, I made up email addresses for each site I visited and had to enter an email address. They were in the form of somedomain.com@mydomain.com. I then entered an alias into sendmail to forward the mail to me, rebuilt the alias file and all worked well. When I switched to Google for Domains, I couldn’t move over those aliases as I had several hundred and Google limited the number of aliases, so I opted to just use a catchall address. As more and more spammers forge return addresses, the amount of “returned mail” I receive has increased. Spammers use addresses like jorge_1975@mydomain.com and when other servers reject it, I get the bounces. Over the last week, I received almost 25,000 pieces of spam and returned mail.

What do I do? Google’s filters aren’t sophisticated enough to let me only accept mail from *.com@mydomain.com, so I setup another account on my Google for domains to catch all the mail. I’m now in the process of setting up filters to forward legitimate mail to my main account. This isn’t ideal, but at the moment, it is the only way to keep all this garbage out of my main mailbox. What is interesting is that it appears that Gmail’s spam learning is on a per-account basis (at least partly) as my new account has only had a few pieces of spam make it threw even though it is getting the same stuff my other account received.

Now if Gmail supported wildcards in filters, this problem would be much easier to solve.

I can’t give up my catchall address as I’ve forgotten all the sites I’ve signed up for and don’t want to potentially lose stuff (like my bank statement), so I guess I’ll just have to live with this current solution.