Why can't I turn the spam filter off completely for some forwarding addresses?

Although we don't recommend it, it is possible to set the spam filtering level to "Off" in many cases.

If you're forwarding your mail to other companies that track or reject spam (including AOL, Comcast, Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail or Mac.com addresses), you'll need to choose at least "Low" spam filtering.

That's because those services will block all forwarded messages if the percentage of spam gets too high. If we don't apply at least some spam filtering, our servers will send them a great deal of spam and they'll block all mail from us.

If you really want to receive mail with no spam filtering, set up a mailbox on our servers and deliver your mail there instead.

In addition, you can't turn spam filtering completely off for a catch-all address, because spammers sometimes try sending thousands of messages to different random addresses in a short time. Turning off all spam filtering for a catch-all address would completely fill up your mailbox. If you want to disable spam filtering for an address, add that specific address in the control panel instead of relying on the catch-all.