When I had mostly recovered from my Yom Kippur fast on Sunday, I went online to check my email, and found that the SpamJadoo people had set up a hosted anti-spam account for my domain. All I had to do was switch my MX records. In my slightly groggy post-fast state, it took me a couple of tries to get that right in the zone editor for the mheller.com domain. Once the DNS change started to propagate, I saw a drama When I had mostly recovered from my Yom Kippur fast on Sunday, I went online to check my email, and found that the SpamJadoo people had set up a hosted anti-spam account for my domain. All I had to do was switch my MX records.In my slightly groggy post-fast state, it took me a couple of tries to get that right in the zone editor for the mheller.com domain. Once the DNS change started to propagate, I saw a dramatic reduction in the number of spams making it to my server, without doing any SpamJadoo configuration at all.It’s never that easy, of course. When I checked the SpamJadoo dashboard this morning, I discovered that over 150 phony mheller.com email accounts had been added to the SpamJadoo coverage list. Ugh. I emailed Shiv, who supports SpamJadoo from Jaipur, India, and explained the situation. He confirmed my theory that SpamJadoo had been set to automatically add any account confirmed by the SMTP server. He hadn’t realized that my SMTP server has a catchall account that I use for “virtual” emails, so that any account, even one made up by spammers, gets an “OK” response. Well, there’s no real reason he should have known that: I hadn’t explained it.After I had some lunch, the two of us got on IM and configured SpamJadoo more tightly. He turned off the “automatic add” option, and went into the database to delete all the accounts. Then we started over and added all my POP3 accounts, plus all the “virtual” accounts I could think of. Then we switched the SpamJadoo verification option from SMTP, which is useless in the presence of a catchall account, to Bounce, so that all the made-up account names that spammers try will be rejected.Since it was midnight in Jaipur at that point, Shiv rebooted the service and went to bed. About five minutes later, I realized that I had forgotten to list two important email aliases. I tried a test email to one of them from another account, and got an immediate “no such user” response. When I tried to log back onto SpamJadoo to add the two aliases, I couldn’t authenticate. I tried another account, and still couldn’t authenticate. I sent an email off for Shiv to look at in the morning, and started to panic.After a few sweaty minutes, it occurred to me that I was trying to log into SpamJadoo with my bare email alias, instead of my full email address. D’Oh. With the actual credentials, I was able to fix the problem myself, and then sent a follow-up email to Shiv explaining my user error.I may still have forgotten to allow some virtual email addresses that I have given out. If you have one of them that now returns “no such user”, let me know at my martin_heller@infoworld.com account, and I’ll fix it for you. Software Development