forward catch-all email to external email

[robocrop]

Hi,

On creating a new cPanel account, it is my understanding that there is a default email account that will receive all email i.e.

cPanel User@domain.com

If this is correct, does that account store all emails received as a normal pop mail account would on the server ?


My main question is that on cPanel account creation I want to forward all mail to that domain.com to an external email account. I don't want to store an emails on the cPanel domain account. So

anything@cPanelAccountDomain.com -> forward to and don't store -> someemail@gmail.com

Is this possible to do?

Thanks,
Ed.

[sparek-3]

This type of behavior can get your server blacklisted (though I'm not sure how Gmail relates to this, they are generally better about blacklisting than a lot of other providers).

Your default address is where mail for all unrouteable addresses goes.

For example if someone sends or tries to send a messages to asdf@yourdomain.com, jkl@yourdomain.com, etc. where do you think those messages go? They go to your default address.

Now, who is really going to write you at asdf@yourdomain.com? How many real legitimate messages are you going to receive at that address? Most of them are going to be spam messages or non-deliverable return messages (when someone sends spam from non-existent addresses on your domain).

Chances are you have a handful of e-mail addresses @yourdomain.com that you know will receive legitimate messages. Just set those up to forward to your gmail account. This way you weed out the unnecessary clutter that comes about from your default address.

I have heard the argument that people use the default address to catch instances where someone misspells their e-mail address. I guess this is true, but honestly people need to learn to spell correctly or perhaps you need to use an e-mail address where misspellings are not as confusing.

Setting up individual forwarders like this can still get your server blacklisted, though it is less likely than forwarding your default address off of the server. Under ideal circumstances if you want to use an @yourdomain.com e-mail address you would set that up as a mail account in your control panel and check it directly using POP3, IMAP, or Webmail. If you are only going to be checking your Gmail address, if that is the only e-mail address you are ever going to check, then why not just give out your Gmail address in the first place and reduce the number of obstacles it takes to get e-mail to you?

[robocrop]

thanks for the reply, maybe it would help if I explained what I need a bit more. I'm not actually offering my customers cPanel access, I'm giving users a free website under their own domain name.

Users on my "hub" site register a domain name and during that process I create a hosting account in the background to hold the HTML files for that site (through PHP/API). (The HTML files are generated from my "hub" site with the users content in them).

So at this point, my PHP script has registered the domain name and created a hosting account and copied a website to that hosting account directory.

The missing piece is email. As this is a trial run, I wanted to keep that part simple. I was just going to forward all mail to their registered domain to the email account they have on the hub site. I figured the easiest way to do this would be to forward the default account. They could then give out info@theregistereddomain.com or myname@theregistereddomain.com and still get those emails. It's ugly I know, but simple from my point of view!

My perfect situation would be to offer them POP mail account creation without cPanel access, which is fine and can be done, but I also want to offer them webmail access to that account without cPanel access.

(they already have a control panel on the hub site and I don't want to give them another URL, username, email and control panel to deal with).

[jandafields]

Just setup their domain to google-apps email. All email to their domain goes directly to google (not going through your server at all, and eliminating any chance of problems), completely bypassing the need for cpanel. Everything other than email is still on your server.