This post came about due to searching for a way to "wildcard" an email address on one of my domains, and discovering that my domain provider didn't support it due to excessive management overhead in handling spam.
I've previously done this myself when OtherInbox stopped providing their own email services and pushed users to Gmail/Yahoo/etc and started providing an integrated organization service against those and other email providers.
Basically you do the following:
- Purchase a domain where you want to have your email sent
- Set up Google Apps for Work ($5 basic/$10 'unlimited a month', per user)
- Add your domain(s) at Google Apps following their directions
- Setup/allow wildcard emails to go to the primary administrator account for your Google Apps domain.
- https://support.google.com/a/answer/33962
- You get some additional awesome in this case, because if for some reason you are receiving spam at a particular address (that may have gotten leaked when a site gets compromised for example) you can simply create a user and disable them (temporarily) to prevent future emails to that address. The reason for disabling the user is to generate some "account doesn't exist bounces" to the spambot.
- The downside is creating the user will put an extra $5 a month charge on your account (monthly user price), but deleting this user before the month is up will discontinue the charge in the future. I haven't personally created a new style Google Apps for Work account to verify (I got grandfathered into the legacy version which gives me a few free users). https://plus.google.com/+EthanS/posts/bEmettyems8
- Caveats:
- Email receiving limits can be quickly reached if someone starts spamming your domain
- Auto forwarding emails can also hit limits
- Groups have much higher limits, so could be useful
- If you are using multiple domains there are some caveats as well, but mostly minor
- https://support.google.com/a/answer/53295
- Profit!
- You can also work around the per user costs by creating new "groups" instead of users if you want to set up "honeypot" or "blackhole" addresses. A "distribution group" according to Google Apps is basically Google Forums for a single email address, and then you can put your primary user in the group for the forum and as you send replies to the forum, it can reply to whoever it was that emailed the group originally. It's kind of a hacky way but this is how Google chose to do distribution lists. The downside of these lists is not having an easy way to make them invalid other than potentially following the same steps as above.
- You can also send from arbitrary accounts by going into your Gmail account's settings and adding a new send from, and since you are using a wildcard on the same domain, the notification will come back into your same account and you can click the link to enable the new account for sending.
