Catch-All Email Questions

#1

I am trying to understand how the catch-all function works and have a couple of questions.

  1. Is it possible to have a catch all for a domain without an set email address (default to an email address on another domain)?

  2. Is it possible to have multiple catch-all emails, one for for each domain? (It doesn’t seem that this is possible, but maybe I am doing it wrong)

  3. Is it possible to have a catch-all email to cover all domains on the account?

#2

Great questions! Let me see if I can tackle them in order so I don’t get lost :slight_smile:

  1. This is possible.
  2. It is. In DirectAdmin (Lisa, Longhorn) go to Advanced Features and then Catch-All E-mail. To change the domain you are configuring at the time, look at the top right for a drop-down box. The process is actually similar for cPanel (our older servers).
  3. Only per domain, but not one that covers all domains in an account. Of course, you can configure the catch-all on each domain to point to the same recipient.

Be careful if using a catch-all to forward all email to third party email services. We commonly see this used for Gmail and while it mostly works and almost no one notices an issue, Google does reject forwarded email for domains that specify a reject in their DMARC record, and this is often for major services like Facebook, eBay, etc. You can miss emails because third party recipient services reject them where we might have delivered them to your inbox with us.

#5

@Jarland,

w/r/t #3, on cPanel, isn’t this the default (sever: friday)? I was just looking at my settings and figuring out how-to configure the catch-all … and I see that by default all messages seems to go to the system account (the “main domain” account).

Or am I reading it wrong? Although, in my testing by sending emails to non-existing accounts at my various domains, it seems to end up in the system account (w/o me having to do anything).

Although, I guess, it is not exactly the same as having one option, to set that will forward all catch-all, to a single specified account OTHER than the system account.

#3

Thanks Jarland! I am trying to set this up so all emails sent to domain1.com and domain2.com are directed to myself@domain1.com. I was able to setup the catch-all for domain1 and this seems to be working. But when I switch to domain2 (which has no email accounts) and try to open the catch-all menu, I get the error message below. Any idea what could be causing this? Also, I am using DirectAdmin (lisa).

error_message
error_message.png832×166 5.79 KB

#4

Interesting @EvilSushiPirate. That seems like a bug. I’ll investigate and get back to you here or privately. I have a couple of more time sensitive items on my list above this, expecting 24-48h to have reached a conclusion/fix.

#6

True but still on a per-domain basis. On cPanel servers the catchall is defined in /etc/valiases/domain.tld, so each one has it’s own setting. There’s a drop-down box to select this behavior for each domain on the Catchall Account page in in cPanel.