A client sent me an urgent message today. Last week he picked up his brand new business cards and then flew to a trade show in another country. At the show he handed out lots of cards to prospective customers. Upon returning home last night he discovered a typographic error in his e-mail address on the cards.<\/p>\n

His domain name was correct, but a stray letter had been added to his user name. Instead of ray@hisdomain.com<\/a>, it read nray@hisdomain.com<\/a>. Naturally he panicked, because he was expecting contact from new customers, who would receive bouncebacks due to the non-existent mail address.<\/p>\n

This is a perfect use for a mail forwarder. Rather than create a new mail account and have my client set his mail software to check that new account, I created a mail forwarder to direct mail from the user name “nray” to his correct mail account ray@hisdomain.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In cPanel it’s easy to create mail forwarders, as I explained in my earlier article about mail accounts and mail forwarders<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Create a cPanel mail forwarder<\/strong><\/p>\n

To create a cPanel mail forwarder, use the \u201cForwarders\u201d function and click the \u201cAdd Forwarder\u201d button. In the \u201cAddress to Forward\u201d field, enter the mail user name \u201c@\u201d the domain of the cPanel you\u2019re logged into. This creates that as a valid address on the server, even though it does not exist as a mailbox. In the \u201cForward to email address\u201d field, enter the desired target or destination to which you want the mail forwarded.<\/p>\n

Other web hosting control panels should have some similar function.<\/p>\n

I could avoid this problem entirely by allowing wildcard addresses to be forwarded to his real mail account. nray@hisdomain.com<\/a>, helpme@hisdomain.com<\/a>, or in fact any user name @hisdomain.com would all be forwarded to his mail account. Years ago I used to set my domains to allow exactly this. These days that’s not such a great idea, as it allows a lot of spam.<\/p>\n

Spammers send mail to common user names such as sales@, webmaster@, postmaster@, john@, bob@, and many more, which they prepend to thousands of domain names. That’s why if you allow wildcard or, as cPanel often calls it, “catchall” mail, you’ll see a big increase in received spam. For my and my clients’ domains, I think it’s better to disallow wildcard mail.<\/p>\n

In just a few minutes, I created the forwarder and now my client can rest easy that he won’t lose this mail. I wish all client issues were solved so easily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A client sent me an urgent message today. Last week he picked up his brand new business cards and then flew to a trade show in another country. At the show he handed out lots of cards to prospective customers. Upon returning home last night he discovered a typographic error in his e-mail address on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":134,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[74],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n