Ed, thanks for sticking with me on this. For what should be such a simple matter, there sure is a lot of confusion.
You said, "If you created an additional email, maybe you set that to the default catchall. Now when you set default to :fail:, you only see routed mail in the original." How can you set the default to :fail: and still have another email address? Isn't it one or the other?
Here's what I think I understood from one of Jim's usenet posts. Assume that there is an account for edwurster.com. The login is edwurst. There is a default email address
edwurst@edwurster.com. A long time ago, all unrouted email to edwurster.com was sent to
edwurst@edwurster.com.
Now, if the default email address is changed to :fail:, all unrouted email AND all email sent direct to edwurst will fail. If another email address is set up, such as
catchall123@edwurster.com, and if CPanel is set to forward all unrouted email to
catchall123@edwurster.com, it will be so routed, but edwurster will still be disabled. Finally, if all unrouted email is explicity set to forward to edwurster instead of :fail:, it will be forwarded there, and email CAN be sent directly to
edwurst@edwurster.com.
At least that's the way I see it. It seems to work that way based on the testing I have done today. If I am correct, the confusion has arisen because apparently the behavior is different if the account was created some time ago. The reason I say this is that the account that originally prompted this thread had its default address set to :fail:, but it was FULL of bounced messages. When I changed it to :blackhole: and then back to :fail:, all email sent to the account name (default) email address bounced.