• emails
• hosting

Why do I need more than one email address for my domain?

You bought your domain, and now you want email for it. You want your name, at your domain, like John@SmithCompany.com, isn't that enough? In an ideal world, probably. Email and spam have been a problem for a long time however. There are automated systems in place around the world that use these accounts to communicate information to a server operator, so they can handle problems as they arise and take appropriate action.

Predefined accounts for your domain that you should pay attention to.

There are a small handful of predefined accounts, such as "admin", and "bounce", and "abuse". These accounts should be actively monitored by someone who can take action about these behaviors.

Admin

The admin account should be monitored by the admin of the server. It can typically be routed to a user on the email servers system, such as the system admin. The emails received by this account should be set in the domain keys as the log receiving addresses. And other admins can mail this if there is a need for whatever reason.

Abuse

The abuse account is typically also set in the dns entry for a domain, so if somebody decides to send a bunch of spam and abuse their privileges, automated systems and people can email the abuse@domain.tld so an admin can take action, otherwise the entire domain could become blacklisted as a spam domain. Care should be taken.

Bounce

A common scenario, someone types an email address in wrong. You're using your program and expecting it to send an invoice automatically to your client, but your typed their email address wrong. So wrong in fact, that no email address exists at the destination server with whatever@server.com, what happens?

The most common solution is for the receiving server, the one you typed correctly, to send what's called a bounce notification. Using email. in order to do this, it emails an account to the senders domain called 'bounce'.