Creating a Catch-all Mailbox – DirectAdmin Tutorial
What is a Catch-all Mailbox:
Catch-all mailbox refers to a email repository on a domain that can “catch all” of the emails addressed to that particular domain name, including the mails directed to any non-existent mailbox.
Let’s illustrate the usefulness of a catch-all mailbox with an example. Suppose, you own a domain name http://www.mydomainname.com and you have set up two domain email addresses – (a) admin@mydomainname.com and (b) contact@mydomainname.com. Now if you configure a third mailbox – common@mydomainname.com – and use this mailbox as your catch-all email, then any email erroneously sent to an invalid email address on your domain (for example, webmaster@mydomainname.com) will be delivered at the catch-all mailbox. Configuring a catch-all mailbox can also prevent losing emails due to misspelling/typo (for example – email sent to contct@mydomainname.com).
Majority of the web hosting service providers allow webmasters to create one catch-all mailbox for each domain name. Creating a catch-all mailbox in DirectAdmin can be a bit tricky, unless you are well-versed with DirectAdmin hosting interface. For the benefit of our valuable readers, we are providing this detailed step by step guide on configuring your first catch-all mailbox using DirectAdmin hosting control panel.
STEP-1: Once you have logged in to your DirectAdmin home interface, scroll down to the “E-mail Management” section. Click on the “Catch-All Email” menu item (Column 1, Row 2).
STEP-2: You are now in catch-all email set up page. By default, the radio button adjacent to “Fail” will be enabled – which actually notifies the sender that the sent mail could not be delivered. Depending upon your preference, you can choose either of the three available options:
The sender is notified that the email does not exist.
The email is dropped and completely ignored.
Set-up a default catch-all mailbox to store all such emails directed to any non-existent mailbox.
As the intention behind this tutorial is to set up a catch-all mailbox, we will go with the third option here.
STEP-3: To set up a catch-all mailbox, enable the third radio button. Select an already created domain mailbox using the drop-down list. You can also choose to type an email address in the input box. Please note that this feature in DirectAdmin allows you to specify even a non-domain mailbox. If you don’t have a domain email account, you can enter your gmail or hotmail account as well.
STEP-4: After providing the input for your catch-all mailbox, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the “Update” button.
A notification will be shown to confirm the set up of your catch-all mailbox.
Please Note: Since the advent of mass spamming, few hosting service providers have disabled this feature. They discourage their customers from configuring a catch-all email account in order to combat spam mails and reduce network congestion. If your hosting partner does not support the configuration of catch-all mailbox, you can try out email alias feature for the email accounts that are often misspelled.
For example, if one of your domain mailbox accounts, contact-us@yourdomain.com, is often misspelled as contactus@yourdomain .com – you can add the later as an email alias for the former, so that emails directed to both these accounts are received by a common mailbox.
