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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.