Managing Your Default Email Account
Did you know that your domain name usually has a default mail account? Every time someone sends an email to a non-existing email account on your domain name, the email lands in the default email account unless you have specified what should happen in this situation.
Sometimes folks wonder why their website keeps growing and growing in size and they start getting notices that they are about to exceed their disk space limitation. If they haven’t loaded any files lately and they don’t have any scripts that add large amounts of data to databases, the default mail account is usually the culprit.
You can specify in your cpanel exactly what you want to happen if someone sends an email to a non-existing email account on your domain.
Let me explain what I mean…
If someone sends an email to joe@promised-land-services.com and I have not specifically set up an account named joe@promised-land-services.com then the email will be forwarded to the default mail account for promised-land-services.com.
The default is usually the account username@domain.com - so if my username for promised-land-services.com is pls then the default mail account would be pls@promised-land-services.com
If I want to use the default account I can - this keeps me from having to set up different accounts for everything if I want to get all the email myself. I can use sales@promised-land-services.com, info@promised-land-services.com, cindy@promised-land-services.com, support@promised-land-services.com or whatever@promised-land-services.com without ever setting up an email account for any of these addresses.
I can then set up the default account in Outlook or whatever mail program I’m using and get any email sent to any of these email addresses.
But, if I don’t want any email to come to my account unless I’ve set up an account, then I can set the default in cpanel to either delete the emails by sending them to the blackhole or I can make the emails bounce. Bouncing the email just returns the email to it’s sender telling them that this email failed.
You really have a lot of control over your email, but if you set up an email account for yourself and never set your default to bounce or disappear, then your default email account may just take over!! A lot of disk space can be saved by deleting the emails in your default email account, many of which are spam, and then setting it to either the blackhole or bounce options.
If you need help configuring your email, let me know - cindy@team-pls.com