Email Domain Forwarding
We’ve been noticing that the option in CPanel labeled “Email Domain Forwarding” has a tendency to be used incorrectly on a regular basis. Hopefully this post will help explain what that section is actually about.
Most users appear to be setting the email domain forwarding up intending it to act as the catch-all email address. In order to have any local part (before the @ symbol) forwarded to a single ‘default’ address, you actually want to set that in the “Default Address” section instead.
Email Domain Forwarding is for when you want to laminate two domains together, particularly useful for parked domains. Please do not enter an email address in the Email Domain Forwarding section, it’ll result in tremendous quantities of email errors.
The result of entering an email address (which Cpanel should not allow, but appears to for some unknown reason) is emails attempting to be sent to addresses like you@yourotheraddress@yourdomain. Ooops! The email server will reject those instantly, but that adds a lot of unnecessary work for the server.
Please only use the Email Domain Forwarding if what you want to do is like this:
you@your2nddomain -> you@your1stdomain. It’ll also automatically forward like this: thatotherfellow@your2nddomain -> thatotherfellow@your1stdomain.
The most useful situation for this option is if you have a .com domain, but also have the .net, .org, etc, domains parked on the .com.
Also, we strongly, very, very strongly, recommend against ever setting the default address. The end result is almost always a flood of dictionary spam. We recommend the default address always be set to :fail: instead. If someone is emailing you, they really ought to know what your email address is, don’t you think?
If you do actually want any random local part to be delivered to your inbox, you can enable that by setting the default address in the default address section.
