Setting your default address to :fail:
The default address for your account is a main source of spam. All a default address is going to do is collect spam. This really puts a lot of strain on the server and the server's spam fighting capability because the server is having to handle this mail. In the simpliest of terms, your default address is where mail goes to an e-mail address on your account, when that address does not exist. Spammers just want to send out their spam messages to as many addresses as possible, so they may flood your domain and send messages to various names and a jumble of characters (i.e. john@yourdomain.com or asdf@yourdomain.com) to try and get their spam message to you. If john@yourdomain.com or asdf@yourdomain.com are not real addresses on your account, then why should the server accept mail for these domains?
We have received some concerns from users who say that they use their default address in case someone mispells their e-mail address. This is true, but it really just cannot justify the wasteful server resource usage. User's need to know how to spell your e-mail address correctly. You can't be expected to have failsafes for every situation where a user makes a mistake. At any rate, if you follow this guide, if someone mispells your e-mail address, they should receive a bounce message back from their sending server saying that their message was undeliverable.
Another issue involving the default address is when someone wants to receive e-mail at one particular mailbox, but aliased to several different e-mail addresses. For example, you may want sales@yourdomain.com, billing@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, and a lot more e-mail addresses all forwarding to tom@yourdomain.com. Instead of setting up individual forwarders, you just choose to use your default address. If this describes your situation, just submit a support request listing all of the address aliases and what address you want all of those addresses to forward to and our support team will add these forwarders for you. We had rather to do this instead of using the default address. Please note, we don't recommend forwarding addresses off of the server.
How discard works
There have been some concerns from individuals in the webhosting industry that using discard or :fail: is a hinderance to fighting spam because of the fail message. The important thing to note, our server will not send a bounce message when the default address is set to discard or :fail:. In an e-mail transaction, the sending server will issue a command:
RCPT TO: <youremail@yourdomain.com>
Our server then performs a check, does youremail@yourdomain.com exist on the server? If not, what is the default address for yourdomain.com set to? If the default address for yourdomain.com is set to :fail: or to discard messages, then our server responds with a 500 failure error. This tells the sending server not to continue. It then becomes the responsibility of the sending server to send a bounce notice back to the sender.
This guide details how to set your default address to discard messages. If we can get all of our clients to set their default address to discard then this will greatly increase our ability to fight spam on the server and allow us to implement future design changes.
Changing your default address
You need to log into your control panel. To access your control panel use the link:
http://yourdomain.com/cpanel
Where yourdomain.com is your domain you have hosted with us.
Once you log in, find the link for Default Address in the E-mail section of your control panel and click this link. The icon will look like:
Under the text Send all unrouted e-mail for: you will see a dropdown list. Now, if you just have one domain name and do not have any addon domains, parked domains, or subdomains, this dropdown list will only list your main domain name. If you have any addon domains, parked domains, or subdomains they will be listed here.
If you were sent here via an e-mail from us, then that e-mail would have stated the accounts or sub accounts that had their default address set to forward or accumulate e-mail.
If you are just going through all of the accounts and sub accounts, you want to pay special attention to the Current Setting when you select each account or sub account. You want this to say :fail: and maybe some other text. The key word to look for, is :fail:
In this particular example I am showing, you can see that I have the default address for mydomain.com set to send mail to john@mydomain.com. I want to change this to discard messages, so I want to select the option Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time) as seen in the following screenshot:
Now click on Change. You will then see the message:
Now you need to go back and repeat these steps for each account and sub account listed.
Once you have this set, the next time a spammer tries to send you a spam message at an e-mail address that does not exist, our server will reject the message before it accepts the message.
If you have any questions or comments concerning this guide, our support staff is always available and willing to help. Simply submit a support ticket and our support team will answer and questions you may have.