For years I have had a catch-all email forwarder from my domain to my gmail account.

This has worked without a hitch

Today(ish) it has stopped working.
Fasthosts are blaming Google saying they have changed their spam filtering & block catch-all forwarders.

Anyone else got the same issue ?

I cannot set up individual email forwarders because I have 100s of email addresses.

I have a catchall from a godaddy administered domain and I’ve had a few gmails today to some of my made up addresses.

It’s all magically working again.

Slightly OT, but WTF is a catch-all email forwarder? Sounds like something I should be interested in having!

Google have recently got a lot tighter with enforcement of Sender Policy Framework (SPF). This is an anti-spam measure that essentially breaks mail forwarding. SPF allows the owner of a domain (e.g. sender.com) to publicly list the mail servers that are allowed to send mail from that domain. If you receive mail to your domain and then forward it on to Google, it will fail an SPF check because it appears to come from your forwarding mail server, rather than the sender.com mail server.

Google recently started treating mail from any domain that doesn’t have an SPF record as “untrusted”, and I suspect may be even more brutal with mail that actively fails an SPF check.

There is a way round it, which is Sender Rewriting Scheme, which as the name suggests, rewrites the sender address of an email at the point that it is forwarded, so that it appears to come from a domain for which the forwarding server is permitted to send from. We’ve recently started deploying this for our customers as without it, mail forwarding is getting increasingly unreliable due to SPF enforcement.

WTF is a catch-all email forwarder?

Something forwards anyaddress@yourdomain.com to another address. We generally advise against them, as spammers will often make up random addresses within a domain in the hope that they exist. What can be very useful is a wildcard address, so as well as having myname@mydomain.com, I can also have myname-anythingatall@mydomain.com. When I sign up to a website, I give an email address like myname-sitename@mydomain.com, so if I start receiving spam I know who leaked my address, and I can simply blackhole that address.

When I sign up to a website, I give an email address like myname-sitename@mydomain.com, so if I start receiving spam I know who leaked my address, and I can simply blackhole that address.

I do that but just with the sitename. Only caught out a couple of sites so far.

Cheers pdw, really helpful.

So I guess you work for a Web hosting company.

Would you care to divulge who.
Mine, fasthosts does a catch all, but not wildcards.

I am guessing that they also do not do Srs.

If you have a gmail account, you can get around the need for catchall with their “Plus address” feature. I use this if I’m not keen on a site having my real email, or for prize draws etc.

e.g.
mygmailname+youllnevergetmyrealaddress@gmail.com

I use this if I’m not keen on a site having my real email, or for prize draws etc.

I have a separate account for anywhere that wants my name, company, email address, date of birth and blood type before emailing me a link to a download. It has no ties back to me at all. Which is just as well, the inbox looks like the contents of a corporate spam filter quarantine folder!

Mind you, I pity the poor sod who owns a@a.com… (-:

Why use a catchall forwarder? Why not just have gmail check your email over POP/IMAP?

In gmail do you have to do anything to enable “plus addresses”? I’ve tried sending some to myself, but they don’t seem to arrive.

Aside…
Flipping heck, just looked in my gmail spam folder. What a treasure trove of lovely ladies and opportunities to make a fortune there are in there!

The “plus” feature is part of the email standard (RFC 822 & RFC 2822).

Why use a catchall forwarder? Why not just have gmail check your email over POP/IMAP?

apart from the spam checking tip above, you would be tied to gmail features.

The “plus” feature is part of the email standard (RFC 822 & RFC 2822).

No, the standards say that “+” is valid character, but they don’t say anything about me+foo@example.com being equivalent to me@example.com.

So I guess you work for a Web hosting company.

Would you care to divulge who.

Happily – I’m one of the founders at Mythic Beasts.

Drop an email to support if we can help. The SRS stuff isn’t in the web interface yet, but we can easily show you how to enable it.

No, the standards say that “+” is valid character, but they don’t say anything about me+foo@example.com being equivalent to me@example.com.

Without referring to RFCs, my understanding is that anything after the @ symbol (eg, @domain.com) has to follow a standard, as it has to be interpreted by multiple servers (though this is remarkably broad these days thanks to internationalised domain names becoming a thing a few years ago). Anything before the @ can be anything you like as it only has to be understood by the final destination server hosting the individual mailboxes. Ie, the ‘+’ thing works for Gmail addresses because that’s how Google’s email servers are configured.