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)