Catch Improperly Addressed Messages

Updated Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Introduction

Catchall is a fallback delivery for recipient addresses on your domain that do not resolve to any explicit mailbox. They sound cooler than they really are.

When a sender mistypes your email address but gets the domain right, the configured catchall on your domain would capture the message and deliver it to a mailbox of your choice. This essentially means you would accept messages at any address of your domain.

You can find the catchall setting in the desired domain’s submenu.

Reasons Not to Configure a Catchall

If this were a good idea, it would have been recommended by email standards. It is not. When someone mistypes the address the message should bounce and that is a good thing.

The destination of the catchall is not necessarily the one the sender wanted to reach. By accepting at all addresses on the domain, the sender will never realize the address was wrong and will never update it in own address book.

Nevertheless, those are not the strongest reasons why you should not use catchalls today. Spammers love catchalls. Their bot networks continuously attempt deliveries to random, common addresses across domains. Once the mail server accepts it, the recipient is marked as verified and then the blasting starts.

While we do spam filtering on all mailboxes, please note that spam filters are not magic. They are based on mathematics and mathematical rules are not an opinion. The more spam coming your way - the higher probability of false negatives landing in your Inbox.

If that is ok with you, go ahead and configure your catchall.

Sending From Any Address

Catchall configures receiving at any address of your domain. If you want to also give the permission to a specific mailbox to send as any address of your domain, take a look at wildcard sending .