Catch-All Emails

Email has been on the top of the daily communication channels list for the contemporary global citizen for more than a decade. Over the years, web hosting companies, engaged to the greatest extent with the provision of email services, have been packing their offering with a growing number of useful features supplementing the existing email functionalities.

All those new email service introductions have contributed a lot to both enhancing and facilitating their customers' email experience. Such features include SPAM filters, working for minimizing the unauthorized access to mailboxes, or Catch-all Emails, which we will examine for you in this article.

Table of contents

• What are Catch-all Emails?
• Why use Catch-all Emails
• Catch-all Emails Benefits
• How to set up a Catch-all email?

What are Catch-all Emails?

The Catch-all email functionality has been created largely for facilitating users' access to a certain mailbox. If activated for a certain mailbox on a domain, the Catch-all option allows for that mailbox to catch all email messages sent to non-existing addresses that contain the domain name in their syntax.

For example, if you set up your mailbox me@my-best-domain.net to be a catch-all one, then any email sent to wrongemail@my-best-domain.net i.e. any mailbox that has not been created for this domain, will be forwarded to me@my-best-domain.net.

Why Catch-all Emails?

Setting up a catch-all option for a mailbox on your domain name has one main advantage. It will help you minimize the amount of lost email messages due to misspelled recipient email addresses. Thus, if a friend of yours, or a colleague, or a customer mistypes your email address he/she will not receive the frustrating Undeliverable or User Unknown messages. Instead, their emails will be forwarded straight to the catch-all mailbox, saving senders' time in trying to figure out what was the correct email, which might eventually make them give up sending the message.

Catch-all Emails Benefits

There have been some discussions over the usefulness of the catch-all email service lately. The pessimistically disposed users state that catch-all emails are a double-edged sword feature. In their opinion a catch-all email can do as much harm as good to users. They think this option can be used by spammers to make users think that a malicious email they receive is sent from a reputable company.

Nevertheless, catch-all emails have proven to be the most efficient method for saving lost messages. Whether it is about important messages mistakenly sent to a misspelled email address or to a mailbox that no longer exists, the catch-all option will be of help to ‘guide' them to the right recipient address.

How to set up a Catch-all email?

Setting up a catch-all mailbox with NTC Hosting is easy indeed. All hosting plans on this website offer a fully-featured Email Manager interface, allowing you to enable Catch-all for a certain email address in a click. All you need to do is log into your Control Panel, go to the Email Manager section and then fill out the short mailbox set-up form under Create New Email. Pay attention to the Catch-all checkbox - you should mark it to make that particular mailbox a Catch-all one.