So first off, what IS a “catch-all” email?
Simply put? It’s just an address set aside on a domain to catch any email sent to that domain, even if it doesn’t exist.

So imagine you email [email protected] but you accidentally type [email protected], with a catch-all it still gets sent to the email server that handles emails for cooldomain.com. PRetty cool right? No? Yeah, it’s kinda lame.

Anywho, why do I need a catch-all email? Well, it’s kinda two parts:

  1. I want to be able to enter an email address for sites to spam (e.g. if you sign up for membership somewhere and they send you a bunch of updates, offers, etc) but it’s getting harder to do the old trick of using + in the email to make something like [email protected] because a lot of places are restricting the use of their name/domain/etc in an email (which is weird. But I digress).
  2. I saw a reddit post and thought it sounded cool and neat
  3. Special added third reason I thought up while typing this: quasi-security! So instead of giving out your actual email, you can give someone a bogus email at that domain and they can use that. So you’re totally secure. Except for the whole them still knowing your domain and such. But hey, it’s fool-proof (except for it not being fool-proof).

Anywho, so how does one go about setting up a catch-all email? It’s actually surprisingly easy. The hardest part is having a custom domain to use because I don’t think it works for stuff like outlook, gmail, etc unless you pay extra? I’m not sure. I set mine up in protonmail, so the steps I take are for that, you’ll have to look up how to do it for whatever client you use, but it should be pretty similar:

  1. assuming you have your domain already set up (this is a paid option), go to Settings>All Settings>Identity and addresses
  2. Make a new alias to serve as your catch-all (this step is optional. You could use your main one, doesn’t really matter in the end). I went with [email protected] for mine
  3. Now go to Domain names and click the arrow under “actions” and select “set catch-all”
  4. Choose the email you want to use
  5. You’re done. Go test it by sending something to a random address@yourdomain and it should appear in your inbox

So we’re back to the whole “why do you need this?” question. Well, simple answer is I don’t. I thought it was neat, it serves a purpose, it was free to do (minus the part of protonmail I already pay for and the domain), and it now lets me use random emails when signing up for things so I can better track who is leaking my data.

So yeah, that’s that. Go set up a catch-all address, or don’t, or do, IDK.