Why you should always use :fail: instead of :blackhole:

[CyberHostUK Tim]

There is a great article on why you should always use :fail: instead of :blackhole:

Please take a look at it HERE and use this thread for discussion and to share your comments on the article.

[AlexV]

Interesting, but it doesn't tell you *where* you should be using :fail:. If, for example, you wanted to keep your catch-all alias, but define specific aliases to fail, do you still get the same benefits described in the article if you use forwarders, or filtering? Neither of those mention :fail:as a valid destination, Filtering mentions Discard, and Forwarders nothing at all.

Adding a forwarder to :fail: for an alias does seem to work, in that mail sent to that address fails, but I don't know if the benefits denying the email before it even reaches the server, or denying the IP address after 4 wrong attempts.

Incidentally, is that a permanent ban of IP address? That seems a bit dangerous, what with dynamic IP addresses, joe-jobs, NAT, proxies and other reasons an IP address might be evil one day, but not the next.