G-suite. I love you. You make much of my life easy, and I’m happy to pay you monthly for the dozens of email addresses I run through your innards. But… when it comes to setting up a catch-all email, I about lost my marbles.
It used to be pretty easy to set up a catch-all when setting up G Suite (or Google Apps) on a new domain, but everything has changed since it was updated and it has become increasingly difficult to set the catch-all address for your account.
If you are not familiar with this feature, G Suite allows one user (or group) to be the default receiver of all email that goes to an email address at your domain that is not connected to an actual user.
For example, if you send an email to call.meeself@domain.com instead of call.myself@gmail.com, your email won’t be lost. Instead, the email will be received by the default user account.
It took me a while to figure out how to set up a catch-all, which was why I decided to create a quick and current tutorial on how to accomplish what used to be a basic feature.
The first thing you should do is to head over to https:admin.google.com/ and login into your domain.
Are you ready? Well, I hope you are.
Steps to take once you’re logged in:
1. From the Admin console dashboard, navigate to Apps and then G Suite > Gmail > Advanced settings.
2. Head over to the routing section or if that would take a bit of your time, just search the page for “Routing”.
3. Once you scroll over to the routing section, hover over the “Routing” line and you’ll see a “Configure” box appear. Once you see the “Configure” box, click on it.
4. Once you make it to the next screen,
- Make sure you give your filter a short description. You can make use of something like “Catch-all”.
- You should also check the boxes for inbound and internal – receiving.
5. Navigate down the page and find “also deliver to”, click on the box beside “Add more recipients” and enter your catch-all address as the recipient.
6. Curve-ball (optional)
This filter will not forward spam messages by default. But if you want to forward spam (just in case), then make sure you click on “Basic” and change it to advanced.
Once you do that, uncheck the box beside “do not deliver spam to this recipient”.
7. Once you’re done with that, click on “Save”.
You should receive a confirmation screen that goes:
8. Click on the “show options” link. It is below the confirmation.
9. The “show options” link opens up a new set of options. Under the options, check for the “account types to affect” and be sure to uncheck “Users” and check “Unrecognized / Catch-all”.
10. Click on “Add Setting”
11. Do not forget to click “Save”!
12. Disable Default Setting
Once you click on save, you now have two settings in your “Default routing” panel, the new setting and the initial one.
The previous setting will send an “undeliverable” email to any user who sends an email to a non-existent user at your domain, while the new setting that was just created will forward the message to the established catch-all address.
If you prefer this sending an “undeliverable email to anyone who sends an email to a user that doesn’t exist at your domain while still reviewing the email at the established catch-all address” then you’re done. You can sit back and relax.
But if you’re like me and would prefer to deliver the email to the catch-all address without sending the “undeliverable” email to the sender, then you need to complete one more step.
How to Disable the old setting
Head over to settings, click on the first one and choose “Disable”.
That’s about everything that you should know about. Once you’re done, then you should have something that looks like this:
It seems crazy that this basic function is so difficult, but unfortunately that is how things are. I really do hope that I’ve been able to help you out with this short tutorial. Good luck!
Also, do let me know if it worked out for you. If not I’ll figure it out once more and update this article again.
Update January 17, 2020 – I recently discovered this pretty awesome (and free) service called ImprovMX. Now this isn’t for any primary “critical” domains you may have, but for any non-active domains you own you can use ImproveMX to instantly (not kidding) have a catchall address that forwards to the email address of your choice. I was impressed at how easy this was, and as far as I can tell it’s quite reliable. Supposedly they have paid plans for power users, but I haven’t been able to find a reason to pay yet. Again, just to reiterate, this is NOT for important domains inside of G Suite, just domains that don’t need mail sent out of them.
Updated: January 17 2020
