Fancy
01-07-2009, 12:16 AM
Prior to coming here to the forums and finding information about HM no longer supporting Catch-All email accounts, I spent all day trying to figure it out on my own. No problem finding the documentation with directions for setting up the catch-all email account, but of course, its impossible to follow them since the option you need is missing. (wish I had accepted that as a signal that the feature was not available but...no, not me... I kept trying)
Thinking I might succeed if I got creative, I created a filter rule that would take all mail "To: (blank)" and "contained: (also left blank)" Then picked the action as: "Redirect to email" and picked the catch-all account I had set up. It successfully created this rule for me. Excited about finding a work-around, I rushed over to the "Email Delivery Route" option to see where it would route a test email that might be sent to an address that didn't really exist at my domain. I typed in a random name@my_domain.com and clicked on "Show Route", and sure enough it showed me the little box with the incoming email and it being successfully routed to my selected catch-all account. Woohoo I was so happy.
Now in reality this isn't working and the mail is being bounced back to the sender. But if HM is going to take away a feature, shouldn't they at least take away the filter rule that lets me leave the "To:" box blank so that a "Show Route" check will not be faked out and show that the incoming mail addressed to an non-existant account WILL be redirected to reach the account I was hoping it would reach. What good is the "Show Route" feature if it can be tricked to show a route that in reality is not being used? Leaving the To box blank created a nice rule that would take email addressed To anyone and apply the rule to it.
I'm glad I did get some input from the other Catch-All forum posts for alternative ways to try to handle this problem, but I would have saved myself a lot of frustration if the Show Delivery Route feature had simply indicated it was going to be bounced back rather than showing a path that was not going to work with actual incoming email. Very confusing.
I'm very unhappy that the Catch-All feature is gone.
Thinking I might succeed if I got creative, I created a filter rule that would take all mail "To: (blank)" and "contained: (also left blank)" Then picked the action as: "Redirect to email" and picked the catch-all account I had set up. It successfully created this rule for me. Excited about finding a work-around, I rushed over to the "Email Delivery Route" option to see where it would route a test email that might be sent to an address that didn't really exist at my domain. I typed in a random name@my_domain.com and clicked on "Show Route", and sure enough it showed me the little box with the incoming email and it being successfully routed to my selected catch-all account. Woohoo I was so happy.
Now in reality this isn't working and the mail is being bounced back to the sender. But if HM is going to take away a feature, shouldn't they at least take away the filter rule that lets me leave the "To:" box blank so that a "Show Route" check will not be faked out and show that the incoming mail addressed to an non-existant account WILL be redirected to reach the account I was hoping it would reach. What good is the "Show Route" feature if it can be tricked to show a route that in reality is not being used? Leaving the To box blank created a nice rule that would take email addressed To anyone and apply the rule to it.
I'm glad I did get some input from the other Catch-All forum posts for alternative ways to try to handle this problem, but I would have saved myself a lot of frustration if the Show Delivery Route feature had simply indicated it was going to be bounced back rather than showing a path that was not going to work with actual incoming email. Very confusing.
I'm very unhappy that the Catch-All feature is gone.