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.