I have my own domain, exonome.com. It is hosted by nshosts through a reseller, webstrikesolutions.com. I have been chugging along with this set up for quite some time.
One of the things it gave me was a catch-all mailbox. It was a mail account with a special name, 'catchall', and all the mail to exonome.com that could not be delivered to another address on exonome would be put there. Which basically means I had an unlimited amount of email addresses, which I used with abandon according to this plan I had. fj.comcast, fj.livejournal, fj.adobe, all @exonome.com, every time some websites asked for a new website address I would make one on the spot. All mail would go to the catch-all address anyway.
Well, I got joe-jobbed, but not maliciously, I think, but like on the Wiki page is described under 'automated spam'. Some spammer sent a huge spam run to thousands of addresses with fake return addresses, all from exonome.com. Well, all the spam mail that was undeliverable, and it was a lot, got 'undeliverable mail' messages sent to exonome.com. They all ended up in the catchall mailbox.
I couldn't delete this by hand. It would take forever. So I went to the nshosts panel and blew away the catchall account. I thought I'd remove it, all the messages would be dropped, and then I'd make the catchall account again, and everything would be back to normal.
It didn't go that way. When I tried to make the catchall mailbox again for exonome, I got the message that nshosts no longer supports those. They were to prone to dictionary attacks -- where a spammer goes down the list of dictionary words to try to guess email addresses at a domain, and those would all end up in catchall -- or the joe job I just got subjected to.
Adobe just called, they tried to send me email to the name I registered with them, fj.adobe @ exonome.com. That email mailbox does not exist, that mail is supposed to go to catchall. I don't have one. I have tons of emails coming in like that. And now they will all bounce, unless I switch mail providers, and probably therefore hosters, soon. Wonderful.
