Businesses may use catch-all email servers to guarantee that all messages sent to an erroneous email address on their domain are delivered. Companies benefit from catch-all email addresses, which allow them to receive communications that might otherwise go unnoticed. You may also find yourself at the mercy of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), like Gmail, if these email addresses show up on your email list.

There is no need to be alarmed! In the long run, you’ll thank yourself for managing catch-all emails. In spite of the fact that they allow you to get into inboxes no matter what, unmonitored catch-all email addresses in your email list might have a negative impact on your deliverability.

Confused? Be at ease. You’ve come to the correct spot if you’ve been left scratching your head by catch-all emails. Catch-all emails, their function, and how to keep your email list healthy are all covered in this article.

What is a “catch-all” email?

An email address that accepts all incoming messages is known as a “catch-all” email address or a “wildcard” email address. Emails sent to any address in the domain name may be received by these.

Any email address may be used even if they don’t exist. Email addresses with mistakes or ones that are wholly made up might fall under this category.

For example, let’s suppose yourdomain.com is the catch-all domain. Only rachel@yourdomain.com, monica@yourdomain.com, phoebe@yourdomain.com, and contact@yourdomain.com are the only email addresses you have for your three workers. Emails sent to info@yourdomain.com or chandler@yourdomain.com will appear in the “contact” inbox if they are sent to the correct email addresses.

Using catch-all email servers may seem counterproductive since it destroys the idea of using email addresses altogether.

The goal of catch-all emails

To ensure that emails sent to invalid or non-existing email addresses are received, businesses utilize catch-all email servers. It’s a technique to make sure essential emails don’t get lost in the shuffle. This is particularly critical for online retailers that don’t want to lose out on any leads or customer service inquiries.

A unique inbox is used only for emails sent to a catch-all address that doesn’t exist so that all of your messages wind up there. To see whether anything new has arrived, most companies run regular checks on the inbox.

That seems like a terrific way to ensure that no message is lost, don’t you think? As a result, catch-all email servers rapidly became a magnet for spam. Unwanted emails drove several firms to abandon or reduce the importance of their catch-all mailbox.

Is maintaining catch-all email addresses a good idea?

Email catch-alls are used in many industries. Uncertainty over whether or not a catch-all email address belongs to an actual person might make it difficult to remove it from a list.

These email addresses might be legitimate subscribers who have opted in to receive your material and may become paying clients in the future. To top it all off, their open rates will help you build your sender reputation and deliverability if they are active subscribers.

Catch-all emails have their drawbacks.

There are a lot of drawbacks to using catch-all emails, so you can’t simply leave them on your list and forget about them.

Sending catch-all emails might harm your reputation as a sender. Even if your email ends up in the catch-all inbox, it’s unlikely that anybody will read it if the recipient’s email address is incorrect. This will have a negative impact on your marketing campaign’s performance and engagement rates.

The “accept-all” indicates all emails will be sent, but this does not mean that your email will be delivered. There is still a potential that your email may be rejected. A hard bounce is a consequence of a company setting a restriction on the number of a catch-all in boxes that may be opened, which results in an initial acceptance of all emails.

In addition, email service providers (ESPs) utilize bounce rate as a measure to determine whether or not you are a good fit for their services. The ESP may cancel your account if the bounce rate rises too much due to catch-all email bounces.

This is, of course, dependent on whether or not your catch-all emails are legitimate and whether or not your email database is clean. However, there’s an easy method to discover this information!

How to check catch-all email addresses

A catch-all server’s emails are untraceable, meaning that you can’t tell whether they’re legitimate or bogus. It’s impossible for any solution on the market to achieve this since it doesn’t have the ability to utilize SMTP to monitor the inbox.

It’s possible to use a cheap email verification tool to see whether any of your email addresses belong to catch-all domains and then devise a plan for dealing with them.