2y ago

wildcard email hosting/forwarding?

I have an ancient domain that for years has been hosted with a company that allowed wildcard email forwarding - so *@example.com was forwarded to my gmail. So over the years, I've just used a new email address for every signup of anything.

Sadly, the company is getting out of hosting, so I need to move the domain somewhere. The commercial email hosting I've seen seen around is all paid for per mailbox.

Is there a commercial email host that would allow a wildcard like that?

I have low desire to run my own email hosting, but perhaps if it's just a bunch of forwards that might be simpler?

36 comments

- I'll second Fastmail.

Cloudflare has a catch-all option that you can enable, but they only allow you to receive emails not send them. https://developers.cloudflare.com/email-routing/setup/email-routing-addresses/
- They actually recently opened a beta for sending emails from Workers as well. There are already a few projects to make use of this, examples:
  https://github.com/Sh4yy/cloudflare-email
  https://github.com/giuseppelt/emailflare

You might want to transfer your domain to another registrar. I use namecheap and they have a “catch all” option that’s free to use. You just set a single forwarding email and everything sent to your domain arrives there.
- Good idea, and that was my first plan too - but it turns out .au domains (that have lots of rules) are limited to a small number of registries - not including the popular US ones.

If you just wanted email forwarding, cloudflare support it. If I remember correctly, it's included in their free plan

Migadu is the best email hoster I know. I've been using them for all my emails during the last three years and never had an issue.
They allow catch-all recipients and forwarding, so your use-case should be possible.
- Second that, I'm hosting my catch-all through Migadu. They support it on their cheapest tier, and it works with no issue.

https://improvmx.com/ may be what you want.
- Great suggestion, thanks. For anyone reading through, it looks like it will just forward all the emails for a domain to a single email address, for free. That's definitely what I want for one of my domains. But the other one I've used some addresses for family, so that will have to go through a provider.
  
  Not sure if that is what you mean, but you can also add different "redirection targets" for different addresses on the same domain in the free tier.

I use zoho for email, they have that feature in the free tier
- Oh man! Zoho was what I was looking at - I just couldn't see that in the feature list. Thanks.
  
  For anyone looking at this in the future: https://www.zoho.com/mail/help/adminconsole/catch-all-setup.html

I've been using Anonaddy for that for quite a while and it's great.

A lot of cPanel hosting includes email with wildcard capability. I set it up sometimes for clients. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions.
- I also suggest cPanel. You can get a web host with Cpanel from about £20-£30 a year.
  setup emails, wildcards, host a site, let's encrypt options, etc. May as well get the most bang for ya buck.

If you by any chance are an apple user and you already pay for apples icloud+ service (eg via Apple one), you can do it via there as well.

Depends on what you’re after but I recently switched to Protonmail and they allow you to use your own domain and set up a catch-all. If you like what they’re offering in terms of encryption and all, it might a great solution for you.
- You also get access to their other products too, like their VPN.

If you move to office 365, it is possible to create an email transport rule to handle this. Effectively any non existent address gets sent to the mailbox your specify.
Yes, they aren't the cheapest option, and it gets meme'd that it should be called office 364,363, etc, but it is a solid service.

Google Domains has catch-all redirect email, and is on the cheap side I'd say.
- If you haven't read the news: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/16/23763340/google-domains-sunset-sell-squarespace
  
  Ooops no, I wasn't aware. Drats, Google again doing Google things.

I assume getting your mail caught in spam folder is not a problem for your use case, right? Then get the cheapest vps you can find on lowendtalk and run mailcow. Use SMTP relay option (with Mailgun, Amazon SES, etc) if the provider disallow outbound SMTP.
- Yep, I can live with no sending, so a forwarding only solution works. I didn't know about the SMTP relays, but a couple of people have mentioned them. I guess I'd try without that first - it might be luck if my ip/hosting service has low trust with gmail.

I use Gandi as my domain host, then Tutanota as my email provider which can be used as a catch-all mail box. I pay like $12/yr for their service, their service is e2ee, and all of their clients are FOSS. Great company to support.
- I use to use tuta as my provider but the lack of IMAP support I moved to mailbox.org basically the same thing if you give them your public GPG key for them to encrypt your inbound emails.
  
  Is it stored on their servers as e2ee though? Yeah the Tutanota client leaves a lot to be desired. I really like how their calendar and email are rolled into one though and it's relatively simple. Still missing a ton of features though.

I also have a different address for every account I have, I'm currently using cloudflare to forward everything to my gmail address, using SMPT in gmail I'm also able to send from those addresses in case I need it.
Downside is I need to enter SMTP for each e-mail address I want to send from, but i really only ever send from info@. Spam wise there's no issue if you've set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC records properly.
- Thank for the diagram. That looks like a comprehensive solution for my issue - and includes sending on one account, which I used to do before google started flagging them all as suspicious.

36 comments