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Tip: The Importance of having an e-mail Catch All

First of all an e-mail Catch All is an email account for your e-mail domain that all misspelled e-mails get delivered to.

So if my e-mail address was colin.diponio @ colindiponio.com

But someone sent an e-mail to colinduponio @ colindiponio.com

In my case It would  end up in my e-mail catch all.

Tip: E-mail addresses are like phone numbers one mistake and they don’t work.

You have two choices

1) Either send these misspelled e-mails to a site black hole and don’t worry about them.

or more sensibly

2) Get a human being to sort through these and manually redirect.

Tip: Most e-mail systems will allow you to create aliases for common misspellings.

Example: Say my e-mail address was published incorrectly in a printed news letter. I would put a redirect of the misspelling forwarding colinduponio to colindiponio.

Based on systems I monitor for my clients in the 20 to 50 users range I can tell you misspelled legitimate e-mails arrive daily. So having someone monitor these is important.

Tip: If you are unsure about what happens with misspelled e-mails in your workplace send a test e-mail from an external e-mail service misspelling your own name and see what happens. If you are lucky you will get a message your can understand like below “User Unknown”.

catchall (Small)

So the tip for the Small Business Owner is: It might be worth checking that e-mail catch all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Small Business, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “Tip: The Importance of having an e-mail Catch All”

  1. Gary F Says:
    June 5th, 2008 at 12:09 pm

    Sorry to butt in, but what about spammers who take your domain name and then mass mail you at SomeRandomMailbox@yourdomain.com. If you use a catch-all then you’re going to have every bit of spam sent to your inbox. If you’re unlucky enough to have that happen to you and you still want a catch-all then at least 2 layers of spam filtering are needed. e.g. your ISP performing some mild filtering (their spam database should be updated daily) and some client side filtering such as Outlook 2007 which has monthly updates. Boy, do I hate spammers! Outlook catches over 500 a week (I have a catch-all) and I have no idea how many my ISP blocks.

  2. Colin DiPonio Says:
    June 5th, 2008 at 1:13 pm

    Hi Gary

    I use a company called http://www.appriver.com to spam filter the messages before I get them (thank god).

    But you are correct I do have a small percentage of random rubbish in the catch all.

    I check the box a couple of times a day. It’s not very sophisticated but it does work.

    Colin