Comcast blocking catch-all wildcard e-mail addresses, and some advice..

Update: Catch-alls originating from EasyDNS to Comcast are now once-again unblocked. That being said, please minimize your usage of catch-all wildcard e-mail addresses where you can. It’s good practice!

Original Post:

Greetings,

Comcast is currently blocking “catch-all” wildcard e-mail addresses originating from EasyDNS. If you have a wildcard e-mail address set up at EasyDNS, and that wildcard e-mail address points to a Comcast destination address, it will likely end up blocked, by comcast.

Important note: This block DOES NOT impact regular mail forwarding for target-specific e-mail address mailmaps.

The best solutions are to a) use a different destination service provider to funnel wildcard e-mail address at, or b) create specific mail-maps for those important addresses. The immediate fix to get your catch-all e-mail working again is to log in to your EasyDNS account, and edit the e-mail address your catch-all points to, to point at a provider other than Comcast.

We are working diligently with Comcast to get our catch-all processing system unblocked, but in the mean time, they are still blocking us.

Now, with all that being said…

A lot of people use wildcard e-mail addresses to “combat” spam, by creating unique e-mail addresses for every sign-up form. While that does have a limited positive impact for personal filtering, it just leaves you open to dictionary attacks and other uglies, like e-mail backscatter.

Catch-all wildcard e-mail addresses are generally a bad idea, because what they really do is increase your volume of spam exponentially. When you have a wildcard e-mail address implemented, spammers can send to any username at your domain, and our mail servers will accept it, and forward it on. So they don’t even have to guess right!

My advice? Don’t use part of your domain as a spam shield. You pay good money to own that property. It’s impossible these days to keep your mail pristine, but using throwaway addresses in your own domain-space just opens you up to even more spam in places you don’t want it to be.

– Do have a throwaway address.
– Don’t host it in your domain-space.

If you need a semi-disposable address, GMail provides an excellent service. I wouldn’t otherwise suggest you “point your spam at host X” but Google seems to eat it up.