What is a catch-all email account?

catch-all is a term used to describe the behaviour of an email account when it is setup in such a way that it recieves email for a particular domain regardless of who the email is addressed to at that domain.

For example:

If a domain called exampledomain.com had a catch-all email setup it would receive the email addressed to anything@exampledomain.com

david@exampledomain.com , boo@exampledomain.com , spam@exampledomain.com etc etc would all be collected.

Advantages:

• If a customer misspells an employees name (example: daavid@exampledomain.com) the email will still be received.
   
• All email is collected in a single email box for easy collection.

Disadvantages:

• Spammers can make up fake email addresses in an attempt to get there email through to readers inboxes. catch-all accounts tend to get much more spam than a regular email account because of this.
   
• catch-all accounts which are left to collect email without anyone downloading it can cause large amounts of email to be collected, taking up space on the web server. If left unchecked for months at a time it can be difficult to download the email due to the large quantities that may be stored. This can be overcome by our support staff however should it ever happen.