Help - I think I screwed up my default address

[Lorem Ipsum]

Help!!

I think I just messed something up in a cPanel account, and I cannot figure out what to do to fix it.

Let's call my domain "domain.com", my cPanel account id "primary", and my one other email account in the domain "secondary". So I use "secondary@domain.com" for most of my email, but I do use "primary@domain.com" for a few things (as well as for my catch-all). This has worked well for me for quite a while (a couple of years).

Until a couple of days ago, when I went to the cPanel "Default Address" screen, it indicated that all unrouted e-mail for domain.com was set to be routed to "primary" (not, "primary@domain.com", just "primary"). Then, the other day, as part of trying to deal with what turned out to be a completely unrelated issue, I went to that screen, selected the "Forward to email address" radio button, and tried to re-enter "primary" in the text field. It had been there all along, but I thought I would re-enter it to try and resolve this other issue.

Big mistake. cPanel would not allow me to enter simply "primary", telling me it was an invalid format, and indicated that I had to enter something of the format "user@domain.com". So I entered "primary@domain.com". And ever since then any mail addressed to "primary@domain.com" is bounced as unroutable.

I found what appears to be a sort of explanation at <http://support.lunarpages.com/knowledge_bases/article/21>, but what it doesn't tell me is how to undo what I've done, and make the domain work the way it had been working before I made this change.

Sorry for being so verbose, but can anyone tell me how to fix this?

Thanks in advance,

Jeremy

[Infopro]

If I understand you correctly, go back in and change it to "Discard with error to sender" And type in :fail: No Such User Here

[Lorem Ipsum]

If I understand you correctly, go back in and change it to "Discard with error to sender" And type in :fail: No Such User Here

Wouldn't that effectively set my catch-all address to be the trash can?

I want "primary@domain.com" to be the catch-all, and it had been functioning this way.

Jeremy

[Infopro]

When you first setup an account on cPanel, before you create any email addresses, and your username for login to cPanel is john and your domain is doe.com, the system has a default address for you of john@doe.com setup by default for all system mails to john the user, on the system.

If you want to use the email address john@doe.com to email Mom you have to create it to use it. It's not already there, the one that's there is for the system. Or is this what you already have set up?

You might like to have a look at this article by chirpy from ConfigServer which explains things pretty good I think.
http://www.configserver.com/free/fail.html

[Lorem Ipsum]

When you first setup an account on cPanel, before you create any email addresses, and your username for login to cPanel is john and your domain is doe.com, the system has a default address for you of john@doe.com setup by default for all system mails to john the user, on the system.

If you want to use the email address john@doe.com to email Mom you have to create it to use it. It's not already there, the one that's there is for the system.

Using your examples...

My past experience has been that I *have* been able to use john@doe.com as a regular email account, without having to create it as a "regular" cPanel email account, in addition to it being a catch-all address that receives mail sent to any non-existant address in the doe.com domain. Perhaps this is not "best practice, but it has worked really well for me. I am very interested in learning more about best practice (and I will read through that link you suggested), but my immediate need is just to undo the change I accidentally made, to restore the functionality I've had.

The problem seems to be that the default address used to be simply "john", but now that I have changed it away from that cPanel won't let me change it back (when I try to enter "john" as the default address, it tells me this is not a valid email format).

Jeremy

[Infopro]

The problem seems to be that the default address used to be simply "john", but now that I have changed it away from that cPanel won't let me change it back (when I try to enter "john" as the default address, it tells me this is not a valid email format).

If you think you've got a problem with your cPanel you can put in a ticket and ask about it.

What happens if you go to that page, tick Discard, added what was suggested above and click Change?

[cPanelDon]

Using your examples...
My past experience has been that I *have* been able to use john@doe.com as a regular email account, without having to create it as a "regular" cPanel email account, in addition to it being a catch-all address that receives mail sent to any non-existant address in the doe.com domain.

When entering the desired address without "@domain.tld" does the name entered match your cPanel account (log-in) username?

Perhaps this is not "best practice, but it has worked really well for me. I am very interested in learning more about best practice (and I will read through that link you suggested), but my immediate need is just to undo the change I accidentally made, to restore the functionality I've had.

I recommend contacting the upstream hosting provider for assistance with reverting to the previous configuration for the default (catch-all) e-mail address as well as investigating the issue of e-mails being bounced or rejected; they will have access to view the configuration files and mail server logs to determine why it is occurring.

The problem seems to be that the default address used to be simply "john", but now that I have changed it away from that cPanel won't let me change it back (when I try to enter "john" as the default address, it tells me this is not a valid email format).

If the system is using cPanel version 11.25 this should be fully alleviated as long as the name entered exactly matches the cPanel log-in username. I have attached a screen capture image of an example where the account username is "cptester" with a primary domain name of "cptester.tld" (the username can be different than the domain).

[Lorem Ipsum]

Sorry for "disappearing" like that. I got distracted by a few unrelated things and the tech support at my domain host got the cPanel account back into working order. But I did want to return at least to thank Infopro and cPanelDon for your help.

As I said, the good news is that functionality has been restored. My hosting provider told me that I was missing a forwarder that needs to be in place for the primary inbox. I have no idea why it disappeared (this is not a new setup), but replacing the forwarder brought functionality back to normal.

The only thing that looks at all different about my cPanel at this point is that the Forwarders screen now shows a forward from "primary@mydomain.com" to "primary", which had not previously been displayed there (where "primary" is the cPanel primary account for the "mydomain.com" domain). My hosting provider had to be the one to replace this missing forwarder, because cPanel would not accept from me a forwarding to "primary" (it said that the forwarding destination has to be in a valid email format). But my hosting provider somehow got it in there.

If the system is using cPanel version 11.25 this should be fully alleviated as long as the name entered exactly matches the cPanel log-in username.

Yes, they match. And, in case it's relevant to anything, I appear to be using cPanel v11.24.5-STABLE, build 38506.


Jeremy