How To Set Up a Catch-All Email Account

What is a catch-all email account?

A catch-all email account allows you to receive messages sent to incorrect or non-existent email addresses within your domain. This is typically configured by routing all unmatched emails to a specified mailbox through your hosting control panel.

For instance, your domain is mydomain.com and you have created 3 personalised email addresses on that domain (e.g. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]). You can set 1 of those 3 valid email addresses as a catch-all email account.

If you set up [email protected] as your catch-all email account, messages sent to misspelled or non-existent addresses like [email protected] or [email protected] will all be routed to [email protected].

This article provides instructions on how to set up a catch-all email account and outlines the available configuration options for handling unmatched emails within your domain.

Setting Up a Catch-all Email Account

If you want to set up an email account to receive all stray emails addressed to your domain, follow the steps below:

Access your Hosting Manager.
Click Default Address.
On the next page, select the domain for which you want to create a catch-all email account.
Select Forward to Email Address, then enter the email address where you want all emails to be forwarded.
Click Change to confirm.

IMPORTANT. Any email sent to misspelled or non-existent addresses on your domain will be sent to the address you typed in the text box under Forward to Email Address.

If you prefer not to receive mails for any invalid email address, you may also choose the following option instead:

Discard and send an error to the sender (at SMTP time).

Stray emails addressed to your domain will be discarded and you can set a customised error message to the sender in the Message text box. This message will notify senders that they have a wrong email address.

You may also prefer any of the following Advanced Options:

Forward to your system account (your domain)	Stray emails will be forwarded to the system account.
Pipe to a Program	Stray emails will be forwarded to a program at the path that you define in the available text box below it.
Discard (Not Recommended)	Stray emails will be deleted and senders will not get any notification about it. IMPORTANT. This option is NOT recommended because the sender will not know that he has the wrong email address and the email delivery has failed.

IMPORTANT. A catch-all email account can be pretty handy for handling stray but legitimate emails addressed to your domain. However, setting one up is strongly not recommended because it can flood your mail server with spam mail. Instead of a catch-all email account, you can simply add commonly misspelled versions of your email addresses as email forwarding entries. You can set these by going to Email in the home page, then to Forwarders.

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