E-mail distribution list

[Alex53]

I want to create an 'alias' that delivers not to just one address but multiple ones, ie. an e-mail group or distribution list.

e.g. webmaster@mydomain.com is received by joe@mydomain.com, fred@mydomain.com, etc.

How would I go about this in the cpanel?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[redsox9]

FYI, BH no longer allows the user of aliases due to concerns with spam. The mail servers were slowing to a crawl before they implemented this policy a few years ago.

The only option I see to do this is to pipe mail to a email distribution program that is sent to a specific address.

[Alex53]

Hmmm. I just managed to do it.

Instead of creating a mailbox called webmaster@mydomain.com I went to forwarders and added a line for each e-mail address that webmaster forwards to;

So webmaster@mydomain.com forwards to joe@mydomain.com
Then a second line webmaster@mydomain.com forwards to fred@mydomain.com
And then a third line, that forwards webmaster@mydomain.com to an e-mail address outside @mydomain.com

I sent an e-mail to webmaster@mydomain.com and all three got it.

[redsox9]

Well, that works, too!

However, while a few forwarders from the same address might not be an issue, the only question would be whether having a much larger number of forwarders (read: hundreds) would tax the mail servers. Someone who knows more than I on that subject might have the answer.

[ldscca]

Nice to find this thread (but not that aliases are unsupported!) though the work-around is interesting.

I have the opposite problem, many-to-one aliasing, instead of one-to-many aliasing. It used to all work like magic from /etc/aliases on the previous host.

I have existing domain aliases username1@domain, username2@domain etc that all need to forward to either a single email box on my bluehost domain or a single mailbox on an outside domain.

Do you think I will need to bring up real email accounts (with appropriate forwarding/deletion) on the bluehost domain for each "alias"?

Ugh, clumsy, but it might work... it's dozens, not hundreds...

thanks
ben

[felgall]

Do you think I will need to bring up real email accounts (with appropriate forwarding/deletion) on the bluehost domain for each "alias"?

Just set those up as forwarders - a few thousand of those wouldn't matter.

It is the outgoing forwarders where every email counts toward your email limit not the internal ones

[redsox9]

...the only question would be whether having a much larger number of forwarders (read: hundreds) would tax the mail servers.

...It is the outgoing forwarders where every email counts toward your email limit, not the internal ones.

So it's a concern when you send email to servers outside your domain but not to those within your domain?

[felgall]

So it's a concern when you send email to servers outside your domain but not to those within your domain?

Every email you forward to an external address is an email sent from your domain and BlueHost have a limit on how many emails you can send per hour. I assume that forwarded emails are included in that limit since the emails appear to the receiving server to have come from BlueHost (which is why forwarding emails to an external address gets BlueHost added to spam blacklists because of the forwarded spam - but that's another separate reason for not using external forwarders).

A forwarder within your account is just pointing to the email account where the email is to be delivered and so having 1000 forwarders to one account wouldn't be any worse than having 1000 separate accounts and would possibly be more efficient in server processing as it probably doesn't have as much overhead for forwarders as for separate accounts.

[ldscca]

I just found an oddity that bears mention, that BillH on bluehost live chat helped me debug.

I was testing forwarders from a gmail account, the same account to which the forwards were destined. The gmail message would land in the bluehost box alright, but never showed back up in the gmail account. Everything looked good, traces looked correct, simple mail from gmail to bluehost and vice-versa was fine, and despite not getting the mail forwarded back, the gmail messages appeared in the bluehost mailbox.

But BillH's mail test DID forward, so then I tried from yet another source address, and it also correctly forwarded to my gmail, proving bluehost forwarders were working fine all along.

Bottom line: don't try to test a bluehost forwarder from a gmail account to which it forwards, because bluehost sends it, but google drops it. And not in spam. Silently. How odd, perhaps an over-ambitious mail-loop detection algorithm...

Now if I just had the domain up and happy, I wouldn't have to test from gmail! Catch-22, thought y'all might like to know... :-)
bb

[agileAgility]

...I was testing forwarders from a gmail account, the same account to which the forwards were destined....

Yikes! Wouldn't that set up an infinite loop if it *had* worked? Maybe gmail recognized the message as one it had already forwarded and dropped it for that reason.