12 July 2014

How to Setup Catch-All Email Account in Postfix

Written by Rahul K.

Catch-All email account is used for received all emails send to your domain. Its help to avoid loosing email due to misspelled address. While using catch-all address you may receive spam messages, and many bounces messages that sent to any-mail(at)yourdomain.com .

This Tutorial will help you to setup catch-all email address with postfix.

Step 1. Configure Catch-All Account

Edit /etc/postfix/virtual and configure your catch-all address like below.

# vim /etc/postfix/virtual

@example.com myuser

If you want to add exception’s in catch-all and do not want to catch-all specific accounts, Add them also in /etc/postfix/virtual file. Below configuration will send all emails to user “myuser” except emails of [email protected] and [email protected]

@example.com myuser
[email protected]  info
[email protected] support

Save /etc/postfix/virtual file and execute following command.

# postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

2. Update Postfix Configuration File

Edit Postfix configuration file /etc/postfix/main.cf and add following line at end of file.

# vim /etc/postfix/main.cf

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

3. Reload Postfix Server

After changing we need to reload server to activate newly settings addedUse following command to reload postfix configuration .

# service postfix reload

You have completed postfix catch-all email setting configuration. Click here to read more about catch all account.

Rahul K.

I, Rahul Kumar is the founder and chief editor of TecAdmin.net. I am Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and working as IT professional since 2009.

7 Comments

Andy Collins Reply to Andy

January 4, 2016 at 9:51 am

Mateo/Miky.
I have multiple virtual domains in Mail Server/Postfix on my Synology and what I found was if you added multiple catch-alls in Virtual then all the caught mail would just go to one domain. How I got around this was within the Synology interface, where you enter your list of domains, the first/primary domain needs to be anything other than your actual domains, so for instance mylocalmail.com. You then add all your other domains after this one. (Sorry I can’t remember what file this is actually editing within Linux). You can then add as many @domain.com entries to virtual as you like. They don’t even need to be the first line in Virtual.
Miky Reply to Miky

January 3, 2016 at 7:44 pm

Thanks, It works like a charm. However, I am have multiple virtual domains on my server. The above instructions work for the main domain (example.com) hosted on the server. How can I set up catch-all for all of the hosted domains and users?
Mateo Reply to Mateo

November 25, 2015 at 1:00 am

So the catchall needs to be in the first line, but what if I have several virtual domains? one file per domain? help plz 🙁
sham Reply to sham

September 13, 2015 at 12:38 pm

It worked for me.
Kirby Reply to Kirby

May 4, 2015 at 12:53 pm

Hi,
Thanks for this article. But you know, I didn’t find a place where I could find caught emails. Could you write where is it?
thankssssss Reply to thankssssss

October 12, 2014 at 12:35 am

Thank you!!! Couldn’t get this to work until I saw you needed “postmap /etc/postfix/virtual”

Thanks again!
Andy Collins Reply to Andy

October 3, 2013 at 6:58 pm

Thank you for this guide. It’s the only one I’ve found which says that the catch-all line needs to be the first line in virtual. Even Postfix’s documentation has it at the end of the list. I’ve already wasted several hours on trying to get the catch-all to work properly, so thank-you for stopping from wasting even more!