Best practice to discard all email to an address

What’s the best practice to discard all email to a given address? Preface: I have a catch-all alias and I want to be able to discard all emails to specific addresses that are unused and spammed too much.

For email addresses that are unused and receive a lot of spam, I currently create an actual account and just don’t ever check it. Is there a better way that just immediately discards any email received to that account? That way the mail isn’t cached on the server wasting space, etc.

It seems like a more efficient option would be to have an alias that directs email to null or similar. I researched this years ago and it was not possible, but wondering if the newer version added any way to handle this.

I’m not sure if this is “best practice”, but what I would do is log into the catchall account in Webmail and setup filters to delete the email I don’t want to receive.

Log into the Roundcube Webmail, and there’s a gear on left column. Click that and at the bottom of the list is “Filters”. That’s where you can create/edit/delete filters. Notice that under the “Actions” section, you have a choice to move to trash, or delete. If you choose move to trash, the email will be in the trash, but continue to occupy space on the server. If you choose “delete”, then it will not go to trash. It’s just deleted.

One more tip. When you setup the filter, you might consider initially setting them up to “move to trash”, so you can review what’s in the trash and confirm that you’ve setup the filters correctly.

Once you are sure everything is the way you want it, then change the filters’ action to “delete”. That way you won’t lose email that wasn’t meant to be deleted. The delete action does the equivalent to what you asked about above (sending email to [/dev/]null), and does it without leaving a trace, so no way to see what was deleted and no way to undo the action.

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