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Asked: 2012-09-05 10:32:28 +0800 CST

How the Postmaster@domain address works

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I'm very new to Exchange (in fact, an apprentice and studying it at the moment) and am wondering how the [email protected] address works. An example:

A smarthost configured with one mailbox, [email protected], with an *@serverfault.com alias so, my understanding, all mail sent to *@serverfault.com is SMTP forwarded onto the [email protected] address.

But what happens now? Does Exchange have a master mailbox Postmaster, that receives all this mail and just dishes it out to the correct mailbox? Or is what I just wrote a pile of garbage!

So I'm a little confused. On the Smart Host - there is SMTP forwarding to forward all SMTP to IP Address x.x.x.x which is active for a mailbox on the smarthost called [email protected] with an alias of *@domain.co.uk? How is this working exactly?

Thanks!

exchange

1 Answers

  1. The postmaster address is an RFC mandated specification. Essentially every e-mail domain on the planet should have one as a best practice. Typically the e-mail that is received at this address is sent or shared with the mailserver administrator.

    Typically Exchange forwards all postmaster e-mail to whatever address is setup as the server administrator. In addition as you pointed out the wildcard prefix is indeed a catch all e-mail address. This means that all e-mail is received by default regardless of whether or not the mailbox exists or not. You may or may not want to disable this so that e-mail sent to the wrong user is rejected (a.k.a. Bounced).

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