A2 Hosting Forums

Please be aware that soon we will not be allowing default addresses set for any domains other than ":fail: no such address here" due to the malicious activity of spam bot networks.  

By having the default address go to an actual address, it causes a great amount of resource usage scanning all the spam coming in while also allowing for spam bots to go ahead with dictionary attacks against a domain.  A dictionary attack is when spammer randomly select email addresses on a given domain sending emails non-stop.  When a default address is present, all the emails are accepted and sent to the default address even though those addresses may not actually exist.  When we set the ":fail: no such address here" option on your domain, we can then pick up on a spammer trying to do a dictionary attack and stop them.  This will create greater email reliability and lower server resource usage providing a better experience for all customers.

How does this affect you?

Any and all reliance you have on the default address of your domain will need to be converted to actual email accounts or forwarders to route your mail where you want it.

Please contact support if you have any questions or feel free to start a thread on our public forum here.  Thank you.

We wish to apologize to those of you having trouble due to this change.  Since we have had many of you express your dismay at this change we are willing to manually setup default addresses for those of you who require it to keep your current email working properly.  We also do apologize for not doing a better job communicating this change to you and will take this as a learning experience and make sure that in the future we absolutely contact every individual via email when making a policy change of this magnitude.  Once again, we do apologize and please submit a ticket if you require a manual default address to be set.  Please do be aware though if your particular domain has problems with dictionary attacks by spam networks we may have to contact you to work on a different solution.  Thank you for your understanding and we certainly appreciate your continued patronage.