Hi Greg,
That was a good response from Kata.
The "default" (or primary) email account that was assigned to you such as
username@domain.com (where username is the same as your login) IS the primary email account that also acts as a catch-all for email coming to your domain. It works as a catch all until you set up individual specific email accounts for your domain, then those inidividual email accounts get their own email, then the catch all (default) gets all the "other" email coming to your domain.
Thus, you had never set up
sales@domain.com or possibly others, and they went into the catch-all. Typically and commonly many spammers will use sales@ and webmaster@ and
info@domain.com as spam email addresses. At one time many businesses used those on their websites for businesses so the spammers "think" that many people still use them.
For those people who do not use those "common" emails (sales etc) the catch-all will get those emails. What you can do, also if you want, is to set up Outlook with a profile for the "catch-all" so that you don't have to use Webmail for checking the catch-all (might be handy for checking for "valid" mistyped emails, such as if you used "george@" and they mistyped as "goerge@". Probably not too common for errors, but Outlook might be handy or more convenient.
As Kata mentioned, the alternatives are bounce or blackhole. In the case of bounce, for spam it may not get back to actual sender (most spam reply or from portions are forged) thus it would be needless traffic, and if bounced and "did" get back to true sender could "confirm" that at least the domain is valid (tho they would know the user@ was 550 invalid)... still rather needless traffic. Blackhole is the best for spam.
What I did was to use email filtering in Cpanel, set it up for
sales@domain.com and
webmaster@domain.com, to discard them. Just use the TO and contains sales@domain set for discard, etc.
Hope this also helps.
