Client emergency solved with a mail forwarder

A client sent me an urgent message today. Last week he picked up his brand new business cards and then flew to a trade show in another country. At the show he handed out lots of cards to prospective customers. Upon returning home last night he discovered a typographic error in his e-mail address on the cards.

His domain name was correct, but a stray letter had been added to his user name. Instead of ray@hisdomain.com, it read nray@hisdomain.com. Naturally he panicked, because he was expecting contact from new customers, who would receive bouncebacks due to the non-existent mail address.

This is a perfect use for a mail forwarder. Rather than create a new mail account and have my client set his mail software to check that new account, I created a mail forwarder to direct mail from the user name “nray” to his correct mail account ray@hisdomain.com.

In cPanel it’s easy to create mail forwarders, as I explained in my earlier article about mail accounts and mail forwarders.

Create a cPanel mail forwarder

To create a cPanel mail forwarder, use the “Forwarders” function and click the “Add Forwarder” button. In the “Address to Forward” field, enter the mail user name “@” the domain of the cPanel you’re logged into. This creates that as a valid address on the server, even though it does not exist as a mailbox. In the “Forward to email address” field, enter the desired target or destination to which you want the mail forwarded.

Other web hosting control panels should have some similar function.

I could avoid this problem entirely by allowing wildcard addresses to be forwarded to his real mail account. nray@hisdomain.com, helpme@hisdomain.com, or in fact any user name @hisdomain.com would all be forwarded to his mail account. Years ago I used to set my domains to allow exactly this. These days that’s not such a great idea, as it allows a lot of spam.

Spammers send mail to common user names such as sales@, webmaster@, postmaster@, john@, bob@, and many more, which they prepend to thousands of domain names. That’s why if you allow wildcard or, as cPanel often calls it, “catchall” mail, you’ll see a big increase in received spam. For my and my clients’ domains, I think it’s better to disallow wildcard mail.

In just a few minutes, I created the forwarder and now my client can rest easy that he won’t lose this mail. I wish all client issues were solved so easily.