Can I create a catch-all email address?

From Acenet Knowledgebase
Revision as of 15:17, 3 October 2012 by Docs admin (talk | contribs)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Catch-all email addresses are disabled by default on all of our shared servers because of the large amount of spam they tend to receive. You can emulate catch-all functionality by setting up email forwarders to catch all normally unrouted mail.


[1] Login to your cPanel and create an email account for the address you would like to act like a catch-all.

For example, you might create the email account "[email protected]"


[2] Create multiple email forwarders for other email addresses to be forwarded to your [email protected] email account.

Example:

[email protected] -> [email protected] [email protected] -> [email protected] [email protected] -> [email protected] etc...


[3] To check your email, login using the credentials of the email account you created above in [1]. This account will receive email sent to any of the addresses you configured as forwarders in [2].

Using this method, you can setup a single email account to catch mail sent to various other addresses. The benefit of this method is that you are not catching unwanted mail sent to bogus email addresses. It's a common practice of spammers to try "Dictionary Attacks" against a wide variety of email addresses. A spammer might use a dictionary of common email addresses and attempt to deliver spam to them. You'll commonly see spammers send spam to:

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ... [email protected]

and so on. If you have a true catch-all email address setup, you would receive mail sent to any of these email addresses even though there is no mailbox or forwarder configured for them. By limiting your catch-all to only those forwarders you setup, you can still receive mail from multiple email addresses in a single location without receiving the spam sent to dictionary style lists.