Implementing a "catch-all" email alias

[southard]

I'm a new Page-Zone user and I'm confused as to how to implement a catch-all email alias which forces unrouted email to fail.

I have a couple of email accounts (let's say default@domain.com and another@domain.com). Assume 'default' is the default address on my account. To that, I've added several forwarding aliases using "Forwarders" in Cpanel. My "Default Address" in Cpanel is currently set to 'default'.

Everything is working fine so far, except that I'm still getting spam email on some old aliases that I no longer use (e.g. bad@domain.com is getting forwarded to default@domain.com, and I don't want that).

I THOUGHT that all I needed to do was change the "Default Address" in Cpanel to ":fail:", which would cause all unrouted mail (i.e. with no valid account or forwarder) to fail. When I did that, however, ALL of my mail started failing.

The only way I've found to kill the old unwanted aliases is to set individual Forwarders for each of them to ":fail:" (undocumented, but seems to work).

Is there any way to simply have "catch-all" forced to ":fail:", but still allow all defined forwards and accounts on the domain to function normally?

[stratplan]

I just finished setting up a default for a domain in the catchall

"Hint: You can enter :blackhole: to discard all incoming unrouted mail or :fail: no such address here to bounce it. "

All unrouted mail for domain will be sent to:domain.com: :blackhole:"

I supposed that 'routed' mail, i.e. with a forward name and info would be forwarded and fake messages, i.e. not named as forwards or mail accounts would fail

The quote above is what the cpanel spot says. Sounds like it should work. If your milage differs, please advise.

[southard]

That's what I tried. Per the instructions in Cpanel that you quoted, I changed the "Default Address" to :fail:, thinking that it should result in failure of only the UNrouted messages. Instead, it causes ALL of my incoming email to bounce back to the sender with a "forced failure" error message, regardless of whether the message is to one of my actual email accounts, one of the defined forwards, or an undefined bogus alias.

The behavior that I'm seeing seems to contradict what it says in Cpanel. I'm trying to figure out if I'm doing something wrong, or if there's an easier/better way to do it.

I didn't try :blackhole:, but I assume that it works the same way as :fail:, except without the bounceback error.

[southard]

Setting the Default Address to :blackhole: works the same way. Instead of only unrouted mail going away (unknown account or forwarding alias), ALL incoming mail dies.

Any ideas on how to get ONLY unknown aliases to die/fail?

This was easy when I was using ZoneEdit for aliasing -- either I had a *@domain.com catch-all alias to forward all undefined aliases to a given account, or I deleted the * catch-all and forced all unknown aliases to fail. I'm just trying to re-create the same behavior here.

[southard]

I guess I must have been the only one confused about this. With Jim's help through a Help Desk request, I now understand how to make this work.

Apparently when you change the "Default Address" in Cpanel to :fail: or :blackhole:, it kills all of your email that would otherwise have gone to the default address on your account. That means that you can no longer use the default email account.

My problem was that most of my alias forwards still pointed to the default email address, so almost all of my incoming email was failing whenever I set Default Address to :fail:, even though the incoming email was directed to a valid alias (the alias, however, was still forwarded to my default account).

The solution was to create a new email account and point all of my aliases to it instead. By not using the default account at all, and setting the Default Address to 'fail', I can get the behavior I was looking for.