What Are Wildcard Emails & Why You Should Use Them
Have you ever come across people with email addresses that look like they were created exclusively for a website? Here’s what I mean.
When creating an account at Pinterest, the email address that may be used to register is pinterest@yourowndomain.com or, when signing up to receive our free yearly blogging planner and calendar and the email address used is blogenergizer@yourowndomain.com. In short, anytime they are asked to provide an email address, they enter any word, number, phrase or combination in the front of the @.
Surely these people didn’t have so much time to create a separate email account for each of these addresses? On that note, you are absolutely correct. This is a simple technology known as wildcard email addresses, sometimes known as catch-all. Once you have it set up, you can create any address you desire on the fly and have it all routed to your real address.
Why do this at all? Let’s count the reasons
- You want to sign up to try a new service but they do not allow free email addresses
- You want to receive information from someone but are new to the author or merchant
- You want to maintain email privacy and keep your real address from prying eyes
- You want to track who’s doing what with your address
- You do a lot of testing and need to create lots of user accounts
- You want to add another small layer of security to your online accounts. For me this is perhaps the biggest reason. If we should have different passwords for different services, why not go one step further and make the email addresses different too? That way, if someone gets hold of one account, they can’t back trace and use the address on other accounts.
How To Set Up Wildcard Email Addresses
Great news! It isn’t hard at all. In cPanel, go to Default Address.
Make sure the domain selected is correct, select the Forward To Email Address. Enter your real email address in the field. Click Change.
And just like that. You have wildcard email addresses enabled, you can now register accounts using unique email addresses and make addresses up as you go. All email will be routed to your real email address.
Watch Out For Spam
The down side with this is spam. Boatloads of it because many bots are set up to automatically send emails to the most common addresses like support@, webmaster@, admin@, sales@ and so on. When you have the catch-all emails directed to your real address, you’ll receive all this spam in addition to the ones you signed up for.
Account Level Filtering Alternative
One way to still have a wildcard address and not be subjected to mindless spam is to use Account Level Filtering using a pattern. To do this, in cPanel, go to Account Level Filtering.
Create A New Filter.
Enter a Filter Name. It can be anything.
Select To, then Matches Regex.
In the field below, enter your address pattern. More on that below.
Under Actions, select Redirect to email, then enter your real email address and click Create.
Address Patterns
In the example above, we used the pattern user_.+@ourdomain.com this means, any address with the pattern user_something@ will work. So user_me@, user_facebook@, user_techbasedmarketing@ all work. If you want to prefix your address with something else other than the word catch simply change your word from user to something else.
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Amazing tip, Lynette! And easy enough even for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Thanks! LexiRodrigo Glad you got it working.
Great tips, Lynette. 🙂
Thank you NikkiBrown1
If only I’d known about this filtering feature years ago when I set up default email addresses! 🙂
MarkFarrar yes, that’s why for a long time I never used default catch-all emails. Filtering works great.
Good to know! Thanks so much for writing this. Excellent step by step directions.
Most welcome deniseoberry !
Great info Lynette
I was under the impression that quite a lot of the hosting companies these days including Hostgator – have actually disabled that feature ( catch all emails) in the c panel these days , probably due to the load on the servers re spam – You can still set up individual emails per say but that defeats the object of the exercise.
I think if you ask your host in provider they will still enable the feature per request.
Thanks again, Great tutorials
Hi WealthSecrets ! Can’t tell as far as HG goes since I don’t use them but the couple of hosts I work with still have them turned on. But account level filtering should still work and that actually is a much better solution. Thanks for sharing!
I wish I’d known about filtering too. It seems to me, knowing this now, there’s never a need to even set up an email account on your hosting account; you just use filtering (and forwarders, if needed,) and direct them to a Gmail account (or whatever you prefer) and use the additional filters there to organize incoming mail.
MitchPowell Exactly. Thanks for stopping by our blog!
LChandler MitchPowell
I realized I STILL need to get Hostgator to enable my “Catch-All” account; and now, what I’m wondering is:
Can I have one email account that forwards to my gmail account, and then have the ability to create wildcards “on-the-fly,” that also go the same gmail account, and also never have to go in to my webmail on my hosting account to clean things up?
Thanks so much for all the help! (Email always confuses me. )
LChandler MitchPowell I have it ALL figured out! If anyone wants to know how to set it all up, let me know. I can now have all unwanted emails discarded, and only those wildcards that match my pattern get through.
MitchPowell LChandler I would like to know this Mitch!
@Boris_yo MitchPowell LChandler I don’t want to hijack Lynette’s thread here; and I’m still working out the details of this anyway. I’ll try to write a blog post about it once I REALLY have it all figured out.
Hey guys! It’s so sad my responses got lost UGH. Anyhow, @mitch, That’s what I do all the time. In fact, I have two on the fly wildcards going to Gmail. All you do is enter the gmail address in the Redirect to email field. As for the other address that redirects to Gmail yes of course, that and the on-the-fly wildcard operate independent of each other. Instead of setting up a POP address, set up the address as a forward.
LChandler Thanks for the reply. I get the feeling a lot of people with numerous email addresses would find this idea very appealing. I started out long ago making websites and creating actual email accounts because I didn’t understand that you could merely create forwarders. Since then, spammers have latched on to a lot of these, and now I need to go around to my various domains to clean things up. I’m sure entrepreneurs who’ve done similarly, would even BUY a product that teaches them how to harden their domains against this sudden flurry of spam. 😀 At the very least, it would be good to elaborate further on this idea and other email-related concepts for marketers and would-be entrepreneurs. Thank you again!
MitchPowell I hear you! Email flow/systems have never been an issue for me but this thread and a recent request for help RE emails have got me planning. If you’re on my email list, look out for an announcement.
I like this post but feel a bit dense, so can you help me? Where you set a pattern using “@ourdomain.com” I assume that “ourdomain.com” is an example, but I should use the real domain I own and have email with, right?
So basically, when I set this up and want to sign up with some new service or something, instead of using my real address at my real domain, I just put in any address that matches the pattern (so I am using a fake username) at my real domain; is that it?
Also, I noticed my cPanel does not have a way to do the first suggestion you made.
Thanks for the help,
Mike
@mike Yes you are correct. You need to replace the domain with whatever domain you have/are using. And correct on the 2nd part too. Just use the fake address.
If you don’t see a default address option perhaps your host has turned it off. Sorry about that. I didn’t realize so many hosts quit doing that.