Thank you!

I think it’s about time to agree upon which role to play, Keven:
Either the anonymous propaganda poster who happened to stumble upon some interesting links or the creator of a service now looking for new customers. But you can’t have it both ways unless you’re a multiple personality or in fact a badly programmed spam bot

Olliver

But the thing about the spam never leaving the spamming server, has to do with an e-mail address that was once in use, but no longer is. If the receiving mail server is set up to REJECT mail, the sending server never gets to send it. The receiving server just won’t accept it.

In regular mail servers, that triggers a bounce. Check the bounce messages you receive. If the bounce is sent by the server where your intended recipient once had an e-mail account, then that server does not reject mail. It receives mail (catch all), then either tries to send it to a mailbox internally, or sends it on to the mailbox server, which then sends a bounce to the sender.

If the bounce was sent by your SMTP server, then the receiving server was set up to reject mail to non-existing addresses.

There are actually all sorts of ways to do this. You can set up a list of addresses to receive for one domain, and reject everything else. You can have catch all domains, and you can have catch all, combined with some addresses that are rejected. All of that on the same server.

The load on the server will be significantly reduced, if you reject as much as possible that isn’t addressed to a user.

I have to also point out that I don’t have much faith in free spam filtering services anymore. So many of them have come and gone. I am very lucky Mailshell didn’t kick me off or make me pay.

But I see that yours isn’t a free only service. That makes it seem more likely to stick around, but makes me a bit worried about the free part. It is an interesting pricing structure you have and should allow many people to continue to use the free service, but as a user you have no control over how much mail you get in a month.

If I get a few huge attachments in one month that would push me into your professional services. It is clear that is more strain on your servers, but I would hope you base the decision on more than one month’s usage or the reason for the overage. If it is mostly spam then clearly the user should be paying for its removal because that is a huge ammount. But if it is just a couple legit messages and not every month I think the user shouldn’t be forced to upgrade.

Is the service ad supported (in the UI or attached to emails) or totally relying on the professional services?

The reason your comment on the other post with a link to your site looks so bad is because it had nothing to do with the post you commented on. That post was on a web spammer blacklist of antispam sites. Email filtering is totally off topic and how you tried to make it fit made it seem like you didn’t actually read the post, just like a spammer. A meaningful comment only linking your name will still get you noticed. An off topic comment will make you look like a spammer.

I agree with you that disposable addresses are no panacea, but as Joe says in his comment, they can be used in combination with other techniques. There are 4 styles of disposable address services that I’ve found:
1) The www.zoemail.com style where you need to pre-enable them
2) The www.spamgourmet.com style where they expire after x messages
3) The www.mailinator.com style where they are simply all public
4) The www.mail-filter.com style where they are a combined with spam scoring

I guess different styles work for different people.

By the way, I wasn’t fishing for a link to my site - I was just hoping you might take a look and give me some honest feedback…