The downside of renting your own domain

I have a few domains - thepotters.org is my main one for the family, stagepics.co.uk is another, ross-online.org.uk and sabos.co.uk are domains that I rent and manage on behalf of others.

Completely separately, there is the subject of spam. When spammers are sending junk mail, they know that many mail servers will do a lookup to check that the mail they are sending appears to come from a valid domain.

So spammers create email addresses based on real domains, with any old string before the "@" sign.

That means that when automated reponses or hate mail come back, they go to the domain that the spammer created. And in all of my domains, I have a "catch-all" set up, so that any email sent to that domain comes back to me.

Which is why I have had over one hundred and fifty mail messages telling me that panuche [at] thepotters.org is not a member. Started the morning beautifully, that did!

IT WISNAE ME!