Ability to Use a Catch-All and Still Bounce Selected E-mail
There should be a way to use a catchall address and have a list of "no-such-user" addresses that cause mail to bounce. This would be helpful when a person was no longer served by that mail server (e.g., Bob Smith is no longer with the firm) and you wanted to provide a bounce for their specific address. If you want to do this now, you can't have a catchall. If you do have a catch-all, then e-mail to Bob Smith's old address won't bounce and the postmaster (or whoever handles the catch-all) sees e-mail from Bob Smith's proctologist saying it's time for Bob's annual exam.
Wildcard Processing for Mailboxes
Wildcard processing does not work logically for mailboxes:
- *@domain.tld works as expected.
Example: If one uses a "catch-all" address for, say, mydomain.com, then an entry is created in the selected catchall mailbox that reads *@mydomain.com and, as one would expect, all e-mail not specifically assigned to other mailboxes goes there (as expected)
*text@domain.tld does not work.
Example: If one creates an entry of *sales@mydomain.com, e-mail addressed to newcarsales@mydomain.com, usedcarsales@mydomain.com, and fleetsales@mydomain.com are either rejected (if there is no catch-all) or routed to the catch-all (if there is one).
text*@domain.tld does not work.
Example: If one creates an entry of repair*@mydomain.com, e-mail addressed to repairbed@mydomain.com, repairsofa@mydomain.com, and repairtable@mydomain.com are either rejected (if there is no catch-all) or routed to the catch-all (if there is one).
Though not tested, I assume that text*text@domain.tld and text?text@domain.tld{e.g., "new*sales@mydomain.com" john?publc@mydomain.tld"} also would not work.
Step 1: Check if unambiguous address is assigned to a mailbox. In other words, if mail comes for popcornsales@mydomain.com, MailEnable should look for a specific entry of popcornsales@mydomain.com in each mailbox.
Step 2: Check if there are wildcard matches that are not a catchall. For example, if mail comes in to "webmaster@mydomain.com", it would be routed to a mailbox for which "*master@mydomain.com" exists as an entry.
Step 3: Check for catch-all entry. If one exists, accept the e-mail, otherwise reject it.
I think that users would need to be cautioned that, if there were overlapping wildcards, that would go multiple recipients. For example, suppose you had mailbox entries for new*sales@mydomain.com, new*@mydomain.com, and *sales@mydomain.com. If an e-mail was addressed to "newcarsales@mydomain.com", it would go to all three.
Given the CPU horsepower which is now readily available, that level of processing to handle the wildcard processing would pose no significant performance penalty to MailEnable. To demonstrate that, I went to a directory on my hard drive that had 13,447 files. At the command prompt, I typed "dir *mon*.*" and 188 files were listed as fast as the screen could scroll (a blink of an eye) and that's with a CPU that's worth all of about $60U.S. brand new (an Athlon XP1700+).
