How to Make a Catch-All Email Address in CPanel

If your friends, family, or business client makes a spelling error when sending you an email, your email client may never receive it. You can, however, configure your account settings to forward those emails to a designated account.

What is a Catch-all Email Address?

cPanel allows you to configure a default address to receive emails not sent to a valid email address, but it is not set by default. This default address is referred to as a catch-all email address. cPanel refers to it as the “default address.”

For example, You have the email address sales@yourdomain, and someone sends a mail to admin@yourdomain. Without the catch-all address, you would never receive it.

You can only set up one catch-all mail address per domain. If you wish for those emails to be sent to more people, you can set up email forwarding from the default address.

How to create a Catch-all Email Address in cPanel

This tutorial assumes that you have already logged into your cPanel and already have created an email address.

How to Create a Catch-all Email Address in cPanel

Click on the ‘Default Address’ icon

• Click on the Default Address icon in the cPanel dashboard. You will find it in the Email section.

Select the domain on your cPanel account you wish to configure unrouted emails.

• Under “Send all unrouted email for the following domain:” select your domain from the drop-down box.

If you have multiple email addresses configured on a cPanel account, you can configure the catch-all address for each.

Select ‘Forward to Email Address’ and Add Your Chosen Email.

You can set any email to be your cPanel default catch-all address. It doesn’t need to be an address created on the same cPanel account.

• Select the “Forward to Email address option.”
• Add the email address you wish to use as your default one.
• Click “Change” at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Your default email account is now set up.

You will then see an acknowledgment that your catch-all email account has been successfully changed.

Other Options

Instead of forwarding the emails to an address of your choosing, you have several alternatives:

• Discard the email while your server processes it by SMTP time with an error message. - This option allows you to discard all emails to incorrect or nonexistent email addresses while sending back a message to the sender, warning that it has not been received.

And, under the Advanced Options drop-down menu:

• Forward to your system account - Each cPanel account has a system email account. If no default email address has been configured, all your invalid emails will end up there. The easiest way to access these emails is via webmail.
• Pipe to a Program - You can choose to pipe the emails to a program. A typical use case is to pipe customer support emails into a ticketing system.
• Discard (Not Recommended) - You can choose to discard the mail. This may be useful if you receive a lot of spam to random or old email addresses that have since been deleted.

Troubleshooting