Why it is impossible to set up a catch-all email address on Exchange
Synopsis
Why you can't set up a catch-all email address on Exchange.
Applicable to
All Sherweb hosted Exchange accounts.
Sherweb does not support catch-all emails on Exchange. Here are a few reasons for this:
- Catch-all emails can greatly increase the amount of spam you will receive. Instead of sending an email to a particular address, a user can use any address as long as it finishes with @yourdomainname.com. For example, if your domain was called sherexample.com, you could have an email address called faq@sherexample.com. If a sender misspelled faq as fab@sherexample.com, you would still receive the email, as the mail server has been configured to accept any email as long as it finishes with @sherexample.com. This can be desirable in some circumstances, but if a spammer gets hold of your domain, he can send you tens of thousands of emails to your account using this technique, and possibly cause a crash or major delays to the server due to the large volume of emails. Hence, we, at Sherweb, consider catch-all emails as a major flaw that spammers exploit regularly and therefore we do not allow this feature for the benefit of all.
- With our Exchange plans, you are entitled to an unlimited number of aliases per mailbox, which means you can already create sales@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, billing@yourdomain.com and redirect those aliases to a specific mailbox.
- Although catch-all emails are often used on POP servers, they are not normally used in business class emails for privacy issues. For example, if someone sends a confidential email to the CEO of a company but makes a mistake in the username, it is better that the sender receives an email saying he made a mistake than for the email to get to a catch-all mailbox and possibly be read by someone else.
If you need further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.