Hiya! I know this shouldn’t be rocket science, but here it goes…

I had this domain—well, technically, I still own it—that I was using for emails and my website. To make my life easier, I created a catch-all on this domain so that all emails are received. For example, if I wanted a Google account, I would use something like [email protected] (spoiler: I had a .ru domain—don’t ask why; sub-spoiler: it is dirt cheap, like me lol!). Everything was fine for almost a year. I was receiving legitimate emails, and if I no longer wanted to receive emails from a certain company, I would just reject all the emails to that address. Like you know those pizza shop emails that you never signed up for, right, but those damn QR code menu and ordering systems must’ve taken it! I just blocked all the emails sent to [email protected]. That simple!

Now one day I woke up and saw like 50 unread emails. I was so confused about what happened. I opened my mail and there they were, tens of emails from some random people in Russian. I don’t know Russian, so naturally I have no idea what it is, but such behaviour is definitely spam in all languages. I noticed that all of these were directed to only one email address, [email protected]. I was like ok, let me go add this to blacklist filter. Easy, right? Problem solved!

Well, you’d hope so. Next day I wake to a few more such random emails to another address now, [email protected]. Again, all were directed to this one address, so I blacklisted this address as well. But those damn spammers are so adamant to reach out to me. This time, they started sending to multiple addresses ([email protected], [email protected], and more…).

At this moment I was so fed up that I knew that it is time 🥲. I had to remove the catch-all because the spammers seemed to have figured it out. But hey, I didn’t stop there. Not only did I remove the catch-all, I removed all emails from that domain. It was kind of troublesome and time consuming to log into all my accounts to change the email address, but I was over those spam email junk in my mailbox every day!

I honestly don’t know how that happened; was it the .ru domain? ‘Cause I have other domains also that I have used in the past with catch-all, and they never got this kind of activity. Are those spammers that desperate that they can’t even take a hint when their mails were getting rejected so many times? Anyway it was all kinda sick, but I have learnt my lesson. I have to either not use catch-all or get an exceptional quality spam filter for my email services. Who knows when those spammers figure out my personal email address and start pinging that!!!