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I've long held the thought of having a mailbox that receives [everything]@[domain], except certain blacklisted addresses.

As certain addresses get spam and/or I lose interest in the business I gave the address to, I add them to the blacklist. So far, I'm using AWS SES, which seems to be focused on the sending of marketing emails, and are not fussed on receiving, but includes rudimentary blacklisting. So far, it's zero cost.



How is it set up with SES? AFAIK they don't provide a POP/IMAP interface.


SES has rule sets for receiving email. I have one rule that matches all the blocked recipients (addresses at my domain that receive spam), which bounces with 'mailbox does not exist' (then stops rule processing), then another rule after that that puts all mail into an S3 bucket.

Then I have a script that uses the AWS CLI to move all the mail from the bucket to a local dovecot server.

The whole thing is really hacky/experimental at the moment, and I haven't given out any addresses, so all that I receive is spam. But the spam I do receive is very little and quickly adds to the blocked recipients list.

Sending using SES uses the built-in SMTP server functionality at AWS and has very generous limits for one who is not marketing.


I presume the parent means Amazon work mail which AFAIR uses SES to send. Last time I evaluated email services, they didn’t handle catch-all which made that a non-starter for us.


Oh no, not WorkMail. That costs ~US$4/user/month, which is not what I want at all. Check my response to your parent post.




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