Catch-all email on your own domain

Set a catch-all when you want to hand out a different address to every service without creating each one first, or when you are afraid of losing mail sent to a misspelled or retired address. Point it at a real mailbox you check, not at a forwarder, and expect to turn it off or filter it once spam finds it. On Faivelo a catch-all is a setting on the domain that delivers into any mailbox you pick, and it is included on every plan, the free forwarding plan too.

Julia Stein runs a two-person framing studio. Her domain has three real mailboxes: julia@, workshop@ and orders@. Over a year she has also typed studio@, hello@, info@ and julia.stein@ onto forms, because suppliers ask for "the general address" and she guesses. With a catch-all, every one of those lands in orders@ and she never has to remember which ones she invented.

The second use is cleaner. Give each website its own address: bank@, courier@, newsletter-tool@. When spam starts arriving at courier@, you know exactly who leaked or sold the address, and you can block that one name without touching the rest. People who do this for years end up with hundreds of addresses and have never created one by hand.

The third is insurance. When someone leaves and their address is deleted, or an old brand name is retired, the catch-all keeps receiving what would otherwise bounce. That buys time to update the people who still write to the old name.

A catch-all accepts mail for addresses that do not exist, which is exactly what spammers probe for. Dictionary attacks send to admin@, sales@, test@ and a thousand first names at every domain they can find. A domain without a catch-all bounces those at the door; a domain with one accepts the lot and your spam filter has to sort it.

Two things keep this manageable. First, deliver the catch-all into its own mailbox or folder rather than your personal inbox, so the noise stays out of the way until you look. Second, retire names that get burned: once courier@ is on a spam list, create it as a real alias that routes to nowhere, or block it, and the catch-all stops accepting it. On most hosts a specific alias always beats the wildcard, so a blocked name stays blocked.

What you should not do is forward a catch-all out to a third-party inbox such as a personal Gmail. The forwarder re-sends every piece of spam from your domain to Google, and Google notices. Enough of that and your domain's reputation suffers for mail you never wrote.

A forwarding catch-all, the kind a registrar or Cloudflare Email Routing offers, takes anything@ and sends it on to an address you already have. It is free and takes a minute. It is also receive-only: when you reply, you reply from the other address, and the person you invented courier@ for now has your personal one. We walk through that problem in Cloudflare Email Routing can't send.

A mailbox catch-all delivers into an inbox that lives on your domain. From there you can reply as the address the message was sent to, which keeps the one-address-per-service idea intact: answer the courier as courier@, and your real name never leaves the building. It also keeps the spam problem on your side of the fence, where a filter and a folder handle it, rather than re-sending it to someone else's servers.

If your host charges per mailbox, the mailbox route costs a seat. On a flat-rate host it costs nothing extra, which is why we suggest creating a dedicated mailbox called catchall@ or inbox@ for it rather than mixing it into a person's mail.

On Faivelo, open the domain, choose Catch-all, and pick the mailbox that should receive unmatched mail. That is the whole setting. Any address with its own mailbox or alias keeps going where it already goes; everything else lands in the one you chose. You can change the target or switch it off at any time, and aliases you create later take precedence automatically.

Elsewhere the setting goes by "catch-all", "wildcard", "default address" or "unmatched recipients". It is nearly always on the domain rather than on a mailbox, and it nearly always needs an existing mailbox as the target. If your host only offers a forwarding target, you have a forwarder, not a mailbox catch-all, and the reply problem above applies.

One check after you switch it on: send a message from an outside account to a name you have never created, and make sure it arrives where you expected. Then send one to a real mailbox and confirm it still goes there. If both pass, the net is in place.