turning the catchall off is really the only thing you can do

I have had it happen before, really annoying but if your ISP says don't worry then that's a good thing.

Chnage hosts. I had this happen to me last month. I tweaked the SPF record to be more stringent and it stopped.

Sounds like your host is lazy.

This happened to me a while back. All you can do is turn off catchall. I would recommend a message of "This email box has been closed due to spam. Please visit http;//yourdomain.com/contact.html".

Kaled.

I would recommend a message of "This email box has been closed due to spam. Please visit http;//yourdomain.com/contact.html"

IMHO this isn't going to happen. Why should the ISP customise the "550 mailbox unavailable or is not local" SMTP error for each customer?

I also had loads of these mails about one month ago. I then disabled my catch-all mailbox and since then it stopped.

Thanks for the advice.

The client does not want to turn off catch-all.

The overnight number of messages has decreased
Monday AM 10,000
Tuesday AM 16,000
Wednesday AM 3,000
The old average was 400 messages

These joe-jobs come and go - they never seem to sit on a particular domain for more than several days (thank goodness!)

I said

I would recommend a message of "This email box has been closed due to spam. Please visit http;//yourdomain.com/contact.html"

Webdoctor replied

IMHO this isn't going to happen. Why should the ISP customise the "550 mailbox unavailable or is not local" SMTP error for each customer?

Obviously, this capability will depend on host, however, I did this myself and it took a couple of minutes using the Plesk control panel. It applies to all non-existent mailboxes.

I'm not in the habit of making daft suggestions.

Kaled.

kaled wrote:

Obviously, this capability will depend on host, however, I did this myself and it took a couple of minutes using the Plesk control panel. It applies to all non-existent mailboxes.

What MTA are you using? Is this on a dedicated server? It sounds like the original poster isn't running his/her own MTA.

I'm not in the habit of making daft suggestions.

ouch.

I didn't say your suggestion was daft, I just think most ISPs wouldn't even consider modifying their MTA's default error messages for a single client.

Many mail clients don't even show SMTP errors to end users in a readable fashion (Outlook w/ Exchange being a classic example).