[General] Default address confusion

I think there has been some confusion over the recent default address notices we have been sending out. We are trying to send these notices out in a somewhat weekly manner at least for a period of time, so that our clients are aware of this. We will probably be sending out another notice next week and I hope to clarify the problems in that message, but I thought I would go ahead and try to clarify some questions in this post.

When you receive the notice concerning your default address in your e-mail, you will see a section saying something like:

Obviously the domain names listed will be different for each client. Some clients may have more than this listed, others may have less. This is just an example, don’t take it too literally.

I created a flowchart to display this better:

See how there are three accounts listed here, yourdomain.net, subdomain.yourdomain.net, and anotherdomain.com. For each of these domains listed ask yourself the following question:

What e-mail addresses at this domain name do I expect to receive e-mail at?

Its really that simple. Basically you are going to answer this question with one of two answers. The first answer, None, at this point you know it is completely safe to set your default address to discard messages as SMTP time. If this is your response, simply set the default address for that domain to discard messages and repeat this question for the next domain listed.

The other answer is:

I expect to receive e-mail at …, …, …

How many e-mail addresses you list is completely up to you. You may list one. You may list two, you may list 200. It doesn’t matter.

Now for each address that you just listed, ask yourself:

Is this e-mail address set up as a mail account or as a mail forwarder in my control panel?

You will have to log into your control panel and check this for each address. If each e-mail address you have listed is set up either as a mail account or as an e-mail forwarder, then it is safe to set your default address to discard messages at SMTP time.

If some or all of those e-mail addresses you mentioned are not set up as mail account or mail forwarders, then consider setting them up as such. You may need to reconfigure your e-mail program to use a new mail username and password, but the benefit is that you will greatly reduce the amount of spam that you are receiving.

If you have a lot of e-mail addresses that you expect to receive e-mail at and you want all of those messages to collect into a single mail account on your account, just contact support and we will be glad to set up those forwarders for you. We can do a mass forwarder set up so that you don’t have to use the control panel interface to set up each and every one of them. Remember, forwarding mail off of the server is a bad idea that will lead to our server becoming blacklisted. It is really preferred that you use forwarders internally, within your domain.

For information on setting your default address to discard message at SMTP time, see our guide which gives great details on how to set this up.