Knowledgebase

In the email section of cpanel you will see an icon named "Default address, click on that and you will now have several choices on the next screen.

On this page there will be a line that says "Send all unrouted e-mail for:" and there is a drop down box with the domain and all the subdomains listed. Choose which domain name you want to set this up for, then select from one of the options below.

"Forward to email address" will send all emails received at your domain name to the address that you can specify here, so regardless of the first part of the email address, the emails will still go through to the address you specify. This can be very dangerous in case's of severe spam attacks where a spammer will flood your domain name with thousands of emails per-second, sent to anything they want @yourdomainname.co.uk which will bombard your mailbox and fill it up instantly, and keep it full for days while you try to download and delete it all, so please USE WITH CAUTION!

Discard with error to sender is the safest option and you can do 2 things with this option. If you leave the "Failiure message" box with the default message of "No such person at this address", this will generate a bounce message for every mis-addresses email to send back to the user, however, if you do suffer a spam attack, this will generate thousands of bounce messages per-second and does tend to drive a server nuts, and if you remove the default error message to leave it blank, then mis-addresses emails will simply be discarded permanently with no bounce message (Ultimate safest option)

Setting the default mail address correctly can severely help reduce the amount of spam sent by people guessing generic accounts such as sales@ or recruitment@ info@ etc etc and so on, so it is well worth setting this up right from day 1, but please do use it with caution, familiarise yourself with it, and if you do set it to send all unrouted emails to an email address of yours, then be prepared to switch it off ASAP in the event of a spam attack.

You can of course also use the default mail address as a bulk forwarding tool, so you can give people any email address you like, just make them up, and you will receive the emails just fine, but of course, you wont be able to reply using the same email address, nor will you have any web mail access for the made up addresses, unless the default address is set as your cpanel username, enabling you to login to webmail with just your cpanel username and pickup all emails in 1 place.