Tip: Close your catch-all email – it is a waste of your secretary’s time
Over ten years ago in the dot com time the webhosting business truly sat off. While the market grew the webhosting offered even more features to their webhotel hosting plans – features that today look rather unimportant.
Think back a feature as e-mail forwarding was a competitive parameter. “Forward up to five e-mail addresses WOW!” or “Unlimited mail forwarding?? No way!”.
Yet one more feature was the catch-all, catch-rest or star-email address. It had many names. The address that caught all them mails which were sent to an falsely spelled email address, not matter what was in front of the @. If a mail was sent to zzz@your-company.com or thismailshouldnotexist@your-company.com your company got it.
Companies had several reasons for using catch-all addresses. With this new kind of interaction you shouldn’t miss any mails at the end of the day. If some one wished to mail to Bill from accounting, but wrongly e-mailed to bil@your-company.com, it was smart that your mail system got it in any case, and someone or piccolo forwarded it. That was good customer service.
Actually it was smart at that time. How ever when companies began to get over overflowing with spam, and viruses began to send out random mail addresses, it wasn’t so smart any longer. Cause even though nobody in your company was named Bill or John, piles of spam and viruses was received to these accounts each workweek.
There fore the catch-all mail is now a extreme waste of your time in your company. Close it down today and your secretary will safe time. Remember if a mail is sent to an address that does not exists, the user gets a return-to-sender from the mail server.
Now the user can react on that, follow up if she made a mistake or if the individual she was making an attempt to mail doesn’t work there any longer.
Lars has been working in the webhosting business for more than a ten years, and now helps corporations with getting the most out of their domains.
