Be careful when you set up a catchall (default) address. Doing so increases the possibility of becoming a victim of spam. A default address allows all mis-routed or mis-addressed emails to be sent to your default or particular email address rather than bouncing.

Set Up CatchAll

You can set up a catchall email address by doing the following:

1. Log into cPanel.

2. In the Mail section, click Default Address.

3. In the drop-down menu below Send all unrouted email for, select the domain name for which you would like to set up the catchall. You will be given different options to choose from which will determine how the mis-routed or mis-addressed email sent to your domain will be handled.

• Discard with error to sender (at SMTP time): Choose this option if you wish for the emails to bounce back to the sender with a specified error message. You may choose the failure message that is given in the bounceback by filling out the Failure Message box.
• Forward to email address: This option is the most commonly used. With this option, all misrouted or misaddressed emails will be forwarded to the email address which is specified. Please be aware that by having all misrouted email go to an email box, you might receive a large amount of unwanted emails to the point that your inbox becomes full.

4. Click the Advanced Options link to see the additional options you may choose for your default address.

• Discard: This option will be used if you do not wish for a bounceback message to be sent to the sender of the misrouted email.
• The Pipe to a program option will send the email to a script of your choice. When piping to a program, you should enter a path relative to your home directory. If the script requires an interpreter such as Perl or PHP, you should omit the /usr/bin/perl or /usr/bin/php portion. Make sure that your script is executable and has the appropriate hashbang at the top of the script. If you do not know how to add the hashbang, just make sure to name your script file with the correct extension and you will be prompted to have the hashbang added automatically.

5. Click Change to complete the set up of the catchall address.