What’s Default Email Account and How It Works

what is default email account?

default email account is also known as “catch-all account”.

the default/catch-all email account would “catch” any mail that is sent to an invalid email address for your domain. all mail that is sent to an address that does not exist will go to the default email account.

for example, lets say your domain is xyzcompany.com, main hosting account username is xyzcom, you have set up three email addresses, aaa@xyzcompany.com, bbb@xyzcompany.com, ccc@xyzcompany.com.

when someone sends email to, say, ddd@xyzcompany.com (which does not exist), the email will be delivered to the so called default/catch-all email account.

who would send email to email address that does not exist? well, sometimes that could be a typo, or more frequently, spam emails. those spammers scan domain records and then send spams to common-names@any-existing-domain-names, for example, john@yourdomain, alice@yourdomain, sales@yourdomain, etc.

so there’s pros and cons to have default/catch-all account. you would not miss any email even if your partner mis-spelled your name, however, the majority (more than 99.9%), in default account are spam emails.

we provide the facility. you decide if you would like to use it yourself.

how to enable/disable default/catch-all account?

you can enable/disable/configure default account yourself in control panel.

1)login to your control panel, (cpanel), at http://www.yourdomain:2082

2)go to “mail” section, the very first icon

3)click on “default address”

4)click on “set default address”

5)you would see “send all unrouted email for your domain to:” and a text box where you can specify what to do with those unrouted emails. you have 4 options here:

A- enter any real email address in the text box so that the unrouted emails would be forwarded to that real email address

B- enter your main hosting account username, for example “xyzcom” (for example above), so that unrouted emails will be delivered to default account on our server. more details on how to access it below.

C- enter “:blackhole:” in text box so that unrouted emails will be discarded. not recommended as the sender would not receive any bounced back or error message if the sender is not spammer and just made typo.

D- enter “:fail: no such address here” in the text box so that unrouted emails will be bounced.

how to access default account on server if it’s enabled?

among the 4 options, case C and D are considered default-account-disabled as the unrouted emails are gone, not stored anywhere for you to access.

for case A, you can find the forwarded emails in that real email address.

for case B, there is an email account, the default account, on the server, however it’s not a real email address. you can access the default email account using main hosting account username as email account username.

in example above, use “xyzcom” as email account username in your Outlook or Outlook Express settings. password is the main hosting account password.

as you can see in this post on email account setup, you should use entire email address as username for normal email address/account.

so you can access the default account in the same way as normal email account, but the username is very different.

some clients find their account over-quota but could not find where the emails/files are. in many such cases, there’re tons of emails in the default account.

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