The difference is that the catch-all account catches all misspelled email addresses and forwards them all to your main email address. By entering specific forwarding email addresses we limit the emails to only legitimate email addresses you have created in the forwarder.

Spammers are sending emails to email addresses with any possible combination of letters therefore any possible combination of email addresses that may not exist. This makes up for a lot of wasted email traffic. By eliminating the catch-all we reduce the potential spam to your account by a factor of a million to one.

Of course - if they send email to the forwarded email address your destination email address will filter it for spam from there but that is still a lot less email to filter than when any old non-existent email address would collect spam before.

All email addresses on our email server have a spam filter if you have activated the Spamassassin feature in the DirectAdmin control panel but the spam filter won't have to work near as hard if it only has to scan emails from a dozen email addresses as compared to 1000's of fake email addresses.

These are the reasons we have canceled the "Catch-All" feature in our DirectAdmin control panel.