Catch-all: is it worth using this feature to retrieve emails?

Posted by jason stewart on March 11th, 2020

 It is estimated that each day about 270 billion emails are sent and received around the world. This number should continue to grow and exceed 300 billion in 2020, according to Statista. Despite all its efficiency, email is not without its problems. With such a large volume of messages being trafficked on the internet, some of them end up not reaching the recipient. Non -existent e-mail, full box, anti-spam filters, and technical problems are just some of the reasons why an e-mail may not be delivered 

The good news is that there are features that help reduce the problems of receiving emails. One of them is catch-all, available in almost all the best email hosting services. Although not ideal for all situations, it can be useful in many situations. In this article, you will know when to use this feature, and also when to avoid it, 

What is catch-all 

Catch-all, also known in Portuguese as “catch-all”, is a feature that allows you to forward, to a specific email account, all messages sent to email addresses that do not exist in the domain in question.

To better understand the feature, imagine that you have a professional email service, on a fictional domain that we will call mydomain.com. In this domain, you have created the accounts pedro@meudomain.com and joana@meudomain.com.

If someone sends a message to francisco@mydomain.com, which is an address that does not exist, the default behavior of the server is not to deliver the message. It is returned to the sender with a warning like “the user francisco@mydomain.com does not exist on the server ". However, if the catch-all is enabled, the message does not return to the sender and is delivered to the default email address. Defined by the administrator when activating the feature.

Thus, pedro@meudomain.com.br could receive not only messages sent to francisco@meudomain.com but messages sent to anything@meudomain.com. Hence the name catch-all, whose translation is precisely catch-all.

When to use the catch-all email feature

The catch-all feature in very cheap email hosting can be very useful for not losing any email addressed to the domain. Eventually, people will make typos when writing an email to a new address. As an example, an e-mail that should be sent to francisco@meudomain.com ends up being sent to ancisco@meudomain.com. If the catch-all is enabled, the email will be sent to the account's default email and can be forwarded later to its actual recipient by the account administrator.

It is certain that if catch-all is not enabled the sender will receive an error message back. However, error return messages are not always clear, which can cause many to fail to realize that the email in question has not been delivered.

In addition to typos, the catch-all feature can be useful when someone tries to contact a company department that does not have an email, such as sales@company.com or marketing@company.com. With catch-all enabled, you guarantee receipt of the message.

A third utility is when an employee leaves your company and has your email account disabled. Catch-all allows messages to arrive, even on previously deleted accounts.

Given the scenarios exposed above, it seems that the catch-all only has positive points, right? But as we will see below, it also has disadvantages, which makes this feature not interesting for most companies.

Disadvantages: when not to use the catch-all

Although catch-all appears to be a useful resource for not missing any messages, it may not be the best alternative in most cases. The main reason is an old acquaintance of those who uses email: spam. Unfortunately, spam has been a reality since the creation of electronic mail and currently corresponds to almost 60% of e-mails that travel on the internet. Everything indicates that this will be a problem that will remain with us for a long time to come.

The spammers, that is, people who send spam, make use of several resources to get new email addresses. One of these resources is to send messages to emails that are common in many companies, as is the case with department emails.

Thus, addresses such as contato@qualquerdomain.com,marketing@qualquerdomain.com, and many others, are frequent targets of spam messages.

So, you can be sure of one thing: regardless of the number of email addresses in your domain, if catch-all is enabled, you will receive spam through it.

And what does that mean? Well, when you receive a significant amount of spam, you will have to deal with some inconveniences, such as those listed below:

Your company's security risks

 The type of message that is sent via unsolicited emails can vary in type and dangerousness, ranging from simple advertising to phishing messages or links to pages infected with viruses/malware.

Receiving messages of this nature puts the company's security at risk. As much as you and your employees are careful when dealing with unsolicited messages, your company is not free of a single careless employee clicking on an infected link, which can be enough to infect other machines on the same network and give a lot of pain. Head for service administrators. 

Quickly filled email boxes

 In addition to the security issue, the number of emails received via catch-all can quickly fill the space available in your company's email service at any given time.

This can be a very big problem, especially in companies that have a shared space between all email accounts and/or that do not have an efficient anti-spam system.

This aspect of the e-mail service alone should be carefully monitored, and even more so when catch-all is enabled. Overcrowding the storage space can have bad consequences, such as leaving the server down and even causing the user's account to be banned, if this is a restriction on their hosting.

But how to avoid losing legitimate emails? Those containing typos or addressed to a former employee? Fortunately, there is a simple and efficient alternative, as we will see below.

An alternative to catch-all: use alternate addresses (aliases)

A feature of most professional email services is the creation of alternative addresses for a single account. Also known as an alias, this feature allows the user of any address (e.g.pedro@domain.com) to receive other addresses in his account (e.g.sales@domain.com).

Because it is not a real e-mail account, but just a forwarding, an alias does not add or consume storage space in the e-mail service. And the number of alias addresses that can be created is usually quite generous, if not unlimited, among professional email services.

Thus, you can cover several types of valid e-mails without having to activate the catch-all. In the case of proper names, one can foresee and create aliases containing common typos to the name in question (ex.: Paul @ domain, paull @ domain, etc.). In the case of departments, aliases can be created for departments whose e-mail address does not exist, just to ensure that a message to the address is delivered (e.g. sales @ domain, purchases @ domain, etc.). Likewise, by deleting a former employee’s email address, an alias can be created to an existing account and prevent future messages to the former employee from being lost.

How to activate the catch-all

If despite all the cons raised here, you conclude that catch-all can be an interesting feature for your company, then you can activate it, which is usually very simple.

The catch-all feature is usually available from the hosting control panel or the professional email service if only this is the contracted service. In some cases, it may be called by another name, such as " default email address ", as is the case with website hosting using cPanel, or " email alias ", as used by the G Suite service, Of Google.

If you were unable to locate the resource on your own, please contact your colocation uk hosting support and they are sure to be able to help you. 

Conclusion

The catch-all feature can be powerful to not miss any messages sent to your domain. Despite this, it should be used with great caution. Because it is a large accumulator of spam, catch-all can put your company's security at risk and even compromise the stability of your email service. This is without considering that, with catch-all, we are creating space for there to be more and more spam, since inappropriate, false and dangerous messages continue to be delivered to valid email accounts.

Fortunately, there are alternatives, such as the creation of forwarding addresses,

Technically called aliases, which are very useful in different situations. Among them we mention the configuration of addresses with typos, departmental and former employee’s emails, to prevent messages sent to these addresses from being lost in the future.



















 

 

 

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jason stewart

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jason stewart
Joined: February 24th, 2020
Articles Posted: 72

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