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I know that GMail for your domain has the ability to catch all email that is sent to a non existing address and forward it to a domain's internal address.

eg: [email protected] is redirected to [email protected], instead of bouncing back to the sender.

I'm considering moving my stuff from Google Apps to Windows Live, but this functionality is a must have for me.

I can't find anything in the Hotmail or Windows Live documentation that states whether or not it is possible to do that, and Windows Live seems to require the user to switch their DNS before showing you the configuration panel.

Does anyone have an experience with this?

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  • Ok, this doesn't look good... :/
    – Luk
    Feb 27, 2012 at 21:20
  • I'm also waiting for this feature. However I moved my domain anyway and everything else works just fine. I asked Microsoft about it but they couldn't give me a time frame for this feature...
    – mikeesouth
    Nov 24, 2012 at 17:20

2 Answers 2

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I asked the same question on Microsoft support last month and, at that time, they said the answer was "no."

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  • My guess is this is not supported because it is inherently not compatible with the "open membership" approach where "Visitors to your website can create their own e-mail accounts in your domain", since your "throw away" email address you are relying on the catchall to forward to the real email address could get "hijacked" by a real user, and there may be privacy implications if a real user ceases to use the service, since their formerly "private" email address is now forwarded to you.
    – Peter
    Dec 10, 2012 at 7:50
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One thing you could try is using a second domain to redirect. It looks like Windows Live would support you creating an email domain, of say

mail.example.com

and then you could create a catchall on your registrar's site (GoDaddy instructions for example) for the "main"/primary domain.

[email protected] (is catchall) (redirects to [email protected])

Of course, this doesn't have to be a sub-domain (which as I haven't tried it may not work anyway), but could be a "related" domain, such as example-staff.com.

It also means for users to get email @ the main domain you have to manually create redirects for every email address you create, and (without work) users' email will originate from the related domain, not the primary domain.

So far from perfect, unless you have a very small number of users, and/or your users can have a different domain than your catchall.

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