Default email address?

[SomeBunny]

I recently parked 2 domains on my main domain, and I'm getting tons of SPAM to my old domains, which is going to my main email account.

I know I saw SOMEWHERE in the control panel, where you could set up a default address where all email that was sent to a non-existing account would go to, like a no-reply address, but now that I need it, I can not find it.

I know its there, and I feel like an idiot for asking, but if someone could point my blind eyes to it, I would be grateful.

Thanks.

[RDM]

That's called catch-all. Which is not recommended because of all the spam that you'll get.

Also this feature will be disabled on Dec. 6th because of too much spam going to catch-all accounts that are overloading the servers.

We apologize for the inconvenience but due to massive amounts of spam we are no longer able to offer catch-all email accounts. These accounts accept all email sent to any email address on a domain, unfortunately this is being abused by spammers, and is causing severe performance issues on our servers. In many cases we are seeing tens of thousands of daily spam messages being received by individual catch-all accounts. In addition to the performance issues, many of the addresses that these catch-all accounts go to are virtually unusable because they are choked with so many spam messages.

On Dec 6th 2006 any catch-all addresses you currently have setup will be disabled. If you are unsure what a catch-all is, or if you are not currently using the functionality of your catch-all, you do not need to do anything as this change will not cause any noticeable effect on your email service. If you are using the functionality of your catch-all address we recommend that you create email forwarders for each email address that you need this service on.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that spammers are a very large issue this year. Every year they pound on email servers all across the world between Thanksgiving and Christmas (mid-November until the end of the year). This year, a lot of the botnets that have previously been used for DoS attacks are now being employed to send spam. Add to that the image spams they are now sending and the fact that they tend to do dictionary attacks to find email addresses, and you end up with a catchall email account receiving up to 1000 emails in a few hours, all of which are very difficult to tag as spam.

The problem then becomes server load. The I/O on the servers has spiked terribly in the last few weeks, mostly due to spam and catchall accounts. The spammer can send to hundreds of accounts on your domain, and if you have a catchall, you gladly accept every one of them. The server then has to process those emails several times, then try to put them in your mailbox, all at the same time. This ends up queueing most of the emails, causing the system to have to process them again later. The end result is that one account with a catchall that gets spammed really hard can cause the entire server to perform miserably.

On the plus side, if you turn off the catchall and create the handful of forwarders that you need, the box doesn't even accept any emails that are not a valid account. It doesn't have to process them, or even deal with them. The loads drop, the disk I/O isn't used for the spam, and the system can handle a lot more legitimate emails, web access, etc.

A catchall is a convenient method of getting all the emails to your domain without having to setup forwarders for each address. Unfortunately, the negatives have now outweighed the benefits. If we want the servers to perform well, the catchall features has to go away.

[Aaron]

Well, it would be appreciated if HM can actually send a notice to all their customers on this issue, since it will affect everyone. It's part of good customer service.

[RDM]

you should be receiving an email about it.

[sdasevne]

Unfortunately, the "Email Forwarder" function in cPanel only allows mail to be forwarded to another domain, not another user.

Previously, I had all mail for anyone@domain1.com forwarded to my hotmail address, hmail@hotmail.com. Now, if I have 3 users, Tom, Dick and Harry, how can I get all mail for all users to go to hmail@hotmail.com? According to cPanel, mail for Tom must be forwarded to Tom (at another domain), same for Dick and Harry. Tom's mail cannot be forwarded to hmail@hotmail.com, and neither can Dick's or Harry's.

The "Email Forwarder" function is insufficient and inflexible:

"A Domain Forwarder redirects all mail from any of your domains to another domain. For example, if you setup bob.com to redirect sam.com, any email send to any address at bob.com will be sent to the corresponding user at sam.com (bob@bob.com would be sent to bob@sam.com). "

Can you change "Email Forwarder" to allow forwarding multiple users to the same email address, please?

[Aaron]

You can add unlimited number of email forwarding to the same email address. You just have to individually set up all the emails that you want forwarded to the same email address.

If you want Tom, Dick and Harry's add to be forwarded to the same email address, you should expect to see the following 3 lines in your email forwarding section.

tom@domain1.com -> default@hotmail.com
dick@domain2.com -> default@hotmail.com
harry@domain3.com -> default@hotmail.com

The only problem is that you have to manually set up each of them, which isn't exactly the most troublesome thing to do anyway.

[welcomesite]

The only problem is that you have to manually set up each of them, which isn't exactly the most troublesome thing to do anyway.

I was just doing that for a number of addresses
and I found it much easier when I began using my browser's 'back' button,
instead of the back button embedded on the page.

This way, most of the info was already filled in and I just edited the name.

[chadu]

That's called catch-all. Which is not recommended because of all the spam that you'll get.

Also this feature will be disabled on Dec. 6th because of too much spam going to catch-all accounts that are overloading the servers.

We apologize for the inconvenience but due to massive amounts of spam we are no longer able to offer catch-all email accounts. These accounts accept all email sent to any email address on a domain, unfortunately this is being abused by spammers, and is causing severe performance issues on our servers. In many cases we are seeing tens of thousands of daily spam messages being received by individual catch-all accounts. In addition to the performance issues, many of the addresses that these catch-all accounts go to are virtually unusable because they are choked with so many spam messages.

On Dec 6th 2006 any catch-all addresses you currently have setup will be disabled. If you are unsure what a catch-all is, or if you are not currently using the functionality of your catch-all, you do not need to do anything as this change will not cause any noticeable effect on your email service. If you are using the functionality of your catch-all address we recommend that you create email forwarders for each email address that you need this service on.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that spammers are a very large issue this year. Every year they pound on email servers all across the world between Thanksgiving and Christmas (mid-November until the end of the year). This year, a lot of the botnets that have previously been used for DoS attacks are now being employed to send spam. Add to that the image spams they are now sending and the fact that they tend to do dictionary attacks to find email addresses, and you end up with a catchall email account receiving up to 1000 emails in a few hours, all of which are very difficult to tag as spam.

The problem then becomes server load. The I/O on the servers has spiked terribly in the last few weeks, mostly due to spam and catchall accounts. The spammer can send to hundreds of accounts on your domain, and if you have a catchall, you gladly accept every one of them. The server then has to process those emails several times, then try to put them in your mailbox, all at the same time. This ends up queueing most of the emails, causing the system to have to process them again later. The end result is that one account with a catchall that gets spammed really hard can cause the entire server to perform miserably.

On the plus side, if you turn off the catchall and create the handful of forwarders that you need, the box doesn't even accept any emails that are not a valid account. It doesn't have to process them, or even deal with them. The loads drop, the disk I/O isn't used for the spam, and the system can handle a lot more legitimate emails, web access, etc.

A catchall is a convenient method of getting all the emails to your domain without having to setup forwarders for each address. Unfortunately, the negatives have now outweighed the benefits. If we want the servers to perform well, the catchall features has to go away.

Along those lines, is there a way to change your "MAIN ACCOUNT" e-mail that is setup on registration so that e-mail that goes there would go instead to one of the e-mail accounts I actually use and check? I don't ever check that mailbox and just noticed today that it has been receiving undeliverable e-mail replies.

Thanks.

Chad

[RDM]

You can set up a forward to do that