Catchall domains

Catchall domains accept any mail to any email address at that domain. They were quite common, particularly at smaller domains, a long time ago. For various reasons, most of them having to do with spammers, they’re less common now.

Most folks think catchall domains are only used for spamtraps. As a consequence, many of the address verification tools will filter out, or recommend filtering out, any address that goes to a catchall domain. They test this by trying to send emails to random addresses like sldqwhhxbe+ym7ajymw23gm0@clientspecific.domain.example.
But not all catchall domains are used for spamtraps. Every client here at WttW gets a domain assigned to them and those domains are catchalls. Emails to those domains go into a database for analysis. Clients (and I!) can create any LHS on the fly to test signups, look at mail flows. Having a catchall means we don’t have to actually configure any address so I can test multiple signups and encode the data about the signup in the to: address.
This works most of the time, at least until verification services mark those addresses as bad and they don’t get imported into the client’s processes. We have some workarounds, and can still get mail despite the services making assumptions.
 
 

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Email verification – what are we verifying

One of the ongoing discussions in the email space is the one about address verification. Multiple companies have sprung up to do “real time” email address verification. They ensure that addresses collected at the point of sale are valid.
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Just yesterday a group of delivery folks were discussing email verification services over IRC. We were talking about the pros and cons, when we’d suggest using them, when we wouldn’t, which ones we’ve worked with and what our experiences have been. I’ve been contemplating writing up some of my thoughts about verification services but it’s a post I wanted to spend some time on to really address the good parts and the bad parts of verification services.
Today, Spamhaus beat me to the punch and posted a long article on how they view email verification services. (I know that some Spamhaus folks are part of that IRC channel, but I don’t think anyone was around for the discussion we had yesterday.)
It’s well worth a read for anyone who wants some insight into how email verification is viewed by Spamhaus. Their viewpoints are pretty consistent with what I’ve heard from various ISP representatives as well.
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Some services can be used for real time verification, and that is a place where I think verification can be useful. But I also know there are a number of creative ways to do verification that also check things like permission and data validity.
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