Possible problem with email forwarding

Need advice before contacting hosting company

[HarryM]

I have two mailboxes set up for my main domain.

[e-mail] - set to FORWARD
[e-mail] - set to CATCH ALL and DISCARD

The issue is that emails addressed to anything which includes [e-mail] gets forwarded on, for example junk#[e-mail].

I would have expected this to have been caught by the CATCH ALL. So is this normal behaviour? I would like to be clear on the facts before raising a ticket.

Just in case it makes any difference the mailboxes are set up with a control panel which is a re-branded version of H-Sphere.

[HarryM]

I suspect I raised this post at precisely the wrong time as everyone was getting ready for Christmas. :)

So a bump. Anyone any advice?

[pageoneresults]

Not sure, but have you tried adding harry@ to your whitelist? Sometimes overly aggressive spam filters will "junk" forwarded (relayed) messages.

[HarryM]

Thanks, but I don't have a white list.

The problem is that the mailbox is set up to receive harry@ but it also accepts anything with "harry" in the address, eg., abcharry@ or harryabc@. I just need to know if this is normal.

[piatkow]

Based on what I see in my mailboxes I don't think this is normal. The forwarding deal that I have zaps anything not for a predefined mailbox and I don't see anything in the format piatkowabc@mydomain delivered. I used to get more of these than for my real address at my old isp email and am sure that the current situation is any different but I haven't explicitly tested for this.

[jtara]

How is the forwarding specified?

Sounds to me like they are using a regular-expression or wildcard match. You will have to read their documentation to find out how to "anchor" the search string.

If they are using standard Unix regular expressions, you could use ^[e-mail] This will require "harry" to start in the first column.

[HarryM]

Thanks,

There is nothing in their documentation to help. The hosting company are scheduled to do an upgrade to their email handling, so I will check afterwards and contact them if the problem still occurs.