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?
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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:
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.
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.
If you just wanted email forwarding, cloudflare support it. If I remember correctly, it’s included in their free plan
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.
Ah yes! That’s exactly what I had & need. Thank you.
Also - lol. I assumed this was a screenshot of your domain, and I was like, hang on…
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
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.
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.
I’ve been using Anonaddy for that for quite a while and it’s great.
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.
My understanding is only tuta to tuta is e2ee (via GPG). However, When you send or receive an external (non-tutanota)email, all they do is encrypt it for your inbox. Obviously its stored unencrypted in gmails servers, if you’re talking to someone at gmail, for example.
From what I remember, you can’t even use GPG to encrypt an email to someone external, you have to use their service that someone has to click a link, put in a password to view.
As for e2ee on the wire, almost all emails are encrypted, this isn’t unique to tuta. It’s basically HTTPS but for emails. Only a bad or misconfigured host would be unencrypted/HTTP.
Edit: to answer your question more directly, i believe mailbox.org + GPG encrypted inbox is the exact same thing as tuta. Not exactly E2EE but I get IMAP and I can use Thunderbird and use GPG with external people.
Yeah I know that about sending emails, which the e2ee may as well not exist lol. But your mailbox and calendar is also all e2ee, which I’m not sure many other services that do that. I’m pretty sure protonmail does though.
I’m not sure if mailbox encrypts their calendar and contacts. I know tuta and Proton do but I self host that stuff anyway so I don’t care.
I use to selfhost everything, including email. However, emailing anyone from my domain I was 99% of the time in the spam list if it went though at all. I got fed up and paid someone to do it for me.
Yeah I self host a lot of stuff, but don’t bother with email. I feel like it’s one of the hardest to configure and maintain, then there’s the spam folder issue you just said.
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.
