Email change related to the postmaster@ address for your domain

We’re rolling out a change to the email system that you should be aware of.

The “postmaster” account is set up by default when we establish email service for a domain, but you have the ability to delete that account. The problem with deleting postmaster@ is that some important messages can be addressed to that address, and that’s because the SMTP RFP says the postmaster account for a domain is required to accept mail.

The change we’ve made is implementing behind-the-scenes forwarding that makes your primary domain admin the “postmaster” account (assuming you have deleted the postmaster@ account – if you have not deleted that account, you won’t see any changes). What that effectively does is ensure that email addressed to the postmaster@ address for your domain is delivered.

The side effect of this change is that you may see an increase in spam on your primary domain admin account, since spammers sometimes send to postmaster@, assuming that it exists on every domain (because they know that it’s supposed to exist).

A possible increase in spam is an unfortunate side effect of this change, but the alternative is the possibility of missing legitimate email addressed to your postmaster@ address. Those legitimate messages can be important, so we had to weigh the value of those important messages against the possibility of an increase in spam.

It’s worth noting though that we made this change on a small group of servers a couple of weeks ago, and we didn’t receive any feedback regarding an increase in spam, so the likelihood is you won’t notice much of a change with this new configuration.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, open up a support ticket and let us know.