Catch-all email forwarding?

Does anyone know which companies let you do this? For free or for a small annual payment?

Do you mean which web/e-mail hosts let you set a catchall address for your domain such that, for instance, mail to any address in yourdomain.com is sent to a single specified e-mail address?

Yes. So <anything>@mydomain.co.uk gets forwarded to [email protected]

Fasthosts do, http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/email/ , but charge £15 a year and it's only one domain. They have a 30 day trial period.

As part of a web hosting package and unlimited domains BlueHost don't, AvaHost do.

My domain provider does: http://www.tamba.co.uk/

I rely on it as part of my anti-spam measures. I run my own mail server and it just sucks everything down from the one postbox hosted by Tamba then filters/resdistributes internally. Incidently I don't know if this is what you're planning but it's a great way to reduce-heck, eliminate-spam.

I give everyone their own address for me (ie;something.thinkbroadband@mydomain). That way I can:

* Reliabily determine the source of the spam - they can fake most of the header but not 'To'
* Block offenders without impacting anything else.

I've been using this system for nearly ten years now and almost never get any spam. The only time I do I block the offender, optionally notify them, optionally notify their ISP/mail host.

If your email server supports wildcards (and all the good ones do) then adding new addresses takes no effort. Just set up a final rule of "something.*" goes to "something".

Purple Cloud. The domain costs £7.34 per 2 years with free forwarding of all incoming to a single target mailbox. I think 1 & 1 have multiple re-directs possible so you can send to different real mailboxes, but I don't need that. I just sort on receipt.

Mine seems to preserve the original "To" and "From" info and not mention the forwarding address in the header of the received message. I think that must be because I am forwarding to an email service hosted by Purple Cloud as well so they can just do an internal transfer. I would think if it were to an ISP mailbox then the "To" would need to be fixed, maybe with a standard "Forward"ed layout which I don't see.

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I give everyone their own address for me (ie;something.thinkbroadband@mydomain). That way I can:

* Reliabily determine the source of the spam - they can fake most of the header but not 'To'
* Block offenders without impacting anything else.

Yes that is exactly what I have been doing. I currently have a set up which involves going through the servers of a friend's company forwarded to my current ISP. However as I am just about to change ISP then I need to hassle them to change the forwarding rules as they do not have the tools to let me do it myself (nor would I want them - it is just a favour on their part). I am trying to move to a solution which means I can change ISP seamlessly without worrying about losing emails in the change of forwarding cracks.

I looked at Purple Cloud this morning but all I could find was 10 mailboxes hosted for £10 a year. No mention of catch-all at all (at all). Do you have a link to further info on their offering you mention.

Well with Purple Cloud I have domain and email hosting for £1.14 per month, and I use their POP3 and SMTP servers. So absolutely nothing at all changes when I migrate. I think 1 & 1 is cheaper but there was something turned me off them at the time I was looking.

Done it twice now.

I had a trial with fasthosts. As I had an existing domain all I had to do was change my mx address to the fasthost mail domain. It was usable within quarter of an hour. The only reason I didn't continue with them was that you could (seemingly) only have one domain for the £15 and I wanted to use it for 4 domains.

My only bugbear with fasthosts was that they wouldn't accept the trial cancellation by e-mail, you have to ring them up.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

I looked at Purple Cloud this morning but all I could find was 10 mailboxes hosted for £10 a year. No mention of catch-all at all (at all). Do you have a link to further info on their offering you mention.

The basic mention of it is on this page under Redirect.

In the Control Panel there is an option to set free web and mail forwarding. (Web addresses for the domain can be forwarded as well). This gives the screen, a bit messed up by the copy and post:-

Forwarding

mydomain.me/co.uk Email Catch-All address: xxx@myrealaddress
Website Forwarding type: [Standard/Framed/Parking]
Website Traget URL http://etc....

Any emails sent to [email protected] will be forwarded to the catch-all address you specify.
For information on web forwarding options, please click here.

--------------------------
I have a few domains, two with their own email package and the rest forwarding free to one of the other two. Works perfectly. Also Website redirection with the real address invisible to the user. (Though I have messed up with the "Title" on the final web page so it shows up on the IE7 Tab, though not in the URL).

Dream-Hosting do this as part of their website hosting at £10/year for their cheapest hosting package. A domain is £7.49/yr. The default address will "catch" any mail addressed to [email protected]. You don't have to set this up.

Edited by rob54 (Mon 16-Mar-09 17:31:00)

It might be worth asking your domain provider. I had no idea that mine did that. I just called them on the off-chance and they were happy to set it up. From what I understand of mail servers it seems to be fairly standard functionality.

For my own mail server I use VPOP3. It's actually configured so that I could run it as a public server (I did for a while) but the current system works perfectly well and saves me running a server 24/7

Edited by Andrue (Mon 16-Mar-09 18:00:14)

That looks good, especially as they seem to allow up to 6 domains for the £9.99.

Just checked. Dream-hosting no longer seem to do catchall e-mail (anti-spam). It seems that as web hosters are stung by catchall spam they disable the feature.

I've been looking into this issue and I'm puzzled. It seems like most of the issues relate to servers that catch and present everything.

I have a rule on the primary mail server that deletes anything that doesn't match my templates. So although I have a catch-all, random junk is going to be silently deleted. Would it be better to bounce it instead?

Edited by Andrue (Mon 16-Mar-09 19:35:35)

I can't help there I'm afraid, my e-mail knowledge is almost certainly less than yours. I expect it might be one of those areas people argue about, is it better to blackhole silently or to bounce politely.

I think a slight mis-understanding has crept in.

As I understand it the OP is asking for a domain host who will forward (catch) all incoming mail and forward it to his real address.

We seem to have moved to catch-all as applied to non-specified addresses, ie spam traps.

I'm using a catchall address in the sense that all unrouted mail for a domain is sent to chosen-catchall-name@domain.

Unrouted mail being any address not matching a mail box.

For instance if I had a domain x.com I might want all unrouted mail to go to [email protected]. Some web/e-mail hosts allow you to do that, some don't. The ones that don't will bounce or blackhole unrouted e-mail.

I use 1and1 for my domains which at the time came with one free email address. Dunno if still does.

I set that email address to be *@mydomain.com which catches all and sends it to a gmail account where i sort it using gmail's excellent rules.

Edited by deleted (Mon 16-Mar-09 21:41:24)

In reply to a post by RandomJointer:

I use 1and1 for my domains which at the time came with one free email address. Dunno if still does.

I think you mean one mailbox, with unlimited aliases? So an unlimited number of email addresses? Which you sort of confirm with the "*" in your redirect.

it's not unlimited aliases as I can only set one name before the @. I chose a wildcard and it worked.

Hmmm. This page now says 100 aliases. Maybe things have changed?

But it also says it comes with a catch all address.

I signed up with dreamhosts (£10 not too much to lose).

In actual fact (contrary to what they say on another page) they still currently support a catch all address.

I have just reconfigured my Dream-hosting email. There is a default email address and as an experiment I did try sending [email protected] to see if it would catch and deliver. It appeared in the Webmail facility but was not delivered to my mail client, probably because I have it set to send and recieve from [email protected]. So I changed the seting in cPanel in the Default Address section to forward all unrouted mail to mydomain.co.uk to [email protected]. And now it does catch all.

I use my o2 address for a few important things, 2 Yahoo address for other stuff + the three mydomain.co.uk email accounts all through Outlook. Pity that o2 don't have any spam filters. At least with Dream-hosting there is Spam Assassin and BoxTrapper. Be nice if all my email, o2, Yahoo as well as mydomain mail could be routed through these.

Indeed it does. I signed up to Dreamhosting and there was a page saying that catchall was no longer supported. I went into cPanel and in fact it is still supported, as I confirmed by a trial. Perhaps the page I saw was old as I swear the news section of the site has nothing later than 2004.

Thanks for all the input guys. Plenty to chew over there. My domains are registered with UK2 who use to do free catch-all forwarding but stopped it a few years back unless you pay a hefty amount which is the point at which I switched to using my friend's mail server for forwarding.

It is curious that a feature which allows a user to take better control over their own handling of spam is removed in the name of better spam handling.

Edited by gomezz (Tue 17-Mar-09 08:53:01)

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I have a rule on the primary mail server that deletes anything that doesn't match my templates. So although I have a catch-all, random junk is going to be silently deleted. Would it be better to bounce it instead?

As 99% of return addresses on spam are spoofed all that bouncing spam does is pass it back to the victim who's email addess is being used. Better to just drop it IMO.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

It is curious that a feature which allows a user to take better control over their own handling of spam is removed in the name of better spam handling.

If you started receiving spam bounces supposedly sent by a randomly generated name @oneofyourdomains.com then you maybe wouldn't be so fond of catch all.

I have the option of catchall but have opted for named mailboxes and just drop everything incorrectly addressed.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Tue 17-Mar-09 08:59:49)

I filter the spam server-side (using Mailwasher rules) so this have never been a problem for me.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

In reply to a post by Andrue:

I have a rule on the primary mail server that deletes anything that doesn't match my templates. So although I have a catch-all, random junk is going to be silently deleted. Would it be better to bounce it instead?

As 99% of return addresses on spam are spoofed all that bouncing spam does is pass it back to the victim who's email addess is being used. Better to just drop it IMO.

That was my thinking. A couple of websites point out that this allows my domain to be used by spammers to legitimise sender addresses. I wasn't very convinced by that argument though. I doubt if many people verify their email senders like that. Most likely deleting incoming email requires fewer resources on both servers than a bounce.

It depends on what kind of catch-all it is.

I think the kind they are trying to kill off are the ones where every incoming email is guaranteed a home. In that case you can end up with hundreds of thousands of emails sat in a 'pending box'. My 'catch-all' is actually a 'catch-some'. If you send email with a random address to my domain it will most likely be deleted.

The wildcard template I currently use isn't very complicated so eventually spammers might add logic that can tailor their [censored] to just the right subset. OTOH since my system accepts everything as far as they know (no bounces) an automated system won't know how to figure out what my wildcard template is.

A dictionary based template attack might succeed eventually but in that case I change my template to something like:

dsfytgh65443.65e4dg455y54.*sader@<my domain>

Yes I have a fairly simple template for email addresses I give to "trusted" respondents. Transient or untrustworthy ones get my hotmail address. But definitely no bouncing. Never have, never will.

The cPanel guide is out of date c/w the current, but only as far as the appearance is concerned. It is now called cPanel Accelerated. Now they have completed their move to servers in the UK it all works a lot better and faster. There was a period where it was unreliable during the switchover. but I guess that is to be expected.

It certainly feels snappier than the USA web-hosting I use, definitely a bargain for a cheapskate like me!

Its Easy to set up in Outlook Express OPRN OUTLLO EXPRESS CLICK ON TOOLS/MESSAGE RULES / Mail / FOR ALL MESSAGES/ forward to people/
click on people and type in the address/s you want to forward to
Click ok and you're done

Lewis Palmer jilldaniels.com

I am pretty sure you do not understand the question as your answer is not relevant.

In reply to a post by gomezz:

I am pretty sure you do not understand the question as your answer is not relevant.

Heh, they aren't the only ones.

I started getting spam sent to my Avast email address last month. An address that I only gave out once, over a year ago when I registered. I tried to warn Avast and its users on their support forum but no-one could see the problem.

Some people suggested a dictionary attack.
Others suggested a trojan or virus infection.

Apparently they couldn't see anything odd about a spammer suddenly targeting (not the real address of course)

[email protected]

So much for security experts.

Edit:If anyone wants to see the responses I got:

http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=49786.0

Oh and I've not had any more addresses go bad since that one and after blocking it all spam stopped reaching my inbox.

Edited by Andrue (Tue 03-Nov-09 08:21:03)