Office 365 - No 'catch all' Annoyance

[SDATTJack]

Hi

We have just received notification that our BT Business email is to be "upgraded" to Office 365 and that the catch-all function will not be available.  We use a POP3 connector to download email from our primary BT email address/account to our Exchange server.  The catch-all redirects all email to the primary address and our POP3, which is then sorted by Exchange server.  Whilst no catch-all will reduce spam etc, this is not an issue for us using Exchange an robust anti-spam software.  However, the catch-all does mean that we still catch all miss-spelt emails etc.  This change means that we will have to setup BT email accounts and/or aliases for all of our users affectively doubling the administration load as staff come and go etc.

The question is this - does anyone know how many aliases can be set up on any one BT email account with Business Email Lite?

[Stephenc]

Hi SDATTJack,

You cannot alias to btconnect.com addresses anymore, but you can alias to an existing email address on your domain name.  As far as I am aware there is no limit to this.

Thanks,

Steve

[Xplan]

Hi, this rolling upgrade seems to have reached us. It has caused devastation because ALL of our mail is collected using a catch all.

Was there any resolution to this downgrade of services? We have been stuck now for several days and things don't seem to be resolvable without moving the hosting of our website to a third party who will forward anything@mydomain to a btconnect account.

I know this will work because my .com email traffic works ok still.
(We forward everything from there to btconnect and our mail server does the rest.

Any info on a less drastic solution would be gratefully received.

Ray

[DaveA]

Hi,

To be honest your only option (in my opinion) is to set up an actual mail server.  Sounds drastic, but in all the time I've been at this I've never believed that the catch all was intended as a substitute for a proper server.

Sorry.

Dave

[Xplan]

Thanks for the reply... 

We do have a dedicated mail server (or at least that's what we call it) but I am guessing you mean an 'actual' mail server - as opposed to our internal mail server.  Our server picks up all the catch-all messages and re-distributes to the wider company users. 

Until this issue developed we were happy (and are still for the .com traffic) with the wildcard model.  Now I am just looking for the quickest and most stable solution.

For the time being we have entered most of the aliases that we can think of via the BT portal - but that keeps crashing - so it is slow progress.  I am looking for a permanent and flexible solution that does not come with any associated down time while we switch over.

By the way, for others out there who are just about to sign up, the catch all rule was, and still is (according to the website) sold by BT for exactly this purpose.  We have complained to tech that the website still shows how to configure the catch all and they just say this is out of date. 

BT Webworld who host our .com site tell us they have no plans to abandon their catch all policy.

I will look in to what is involved in getting our traffic sent straight to our own server, but I have to admit I am worried about reliability.

Thanks

Ray

[SDATTJack]

Hi Ray

I realise this post is quite old now.

We used to collect all mail from BT using a Pop3 connector which diposits the mail into our Exchange server.  As the Exchange server sorts out the user destination mail boxes we have always used the 'catch all' option with BT.

The only solution to our problems was to laboriously create several hundred aliases in BT My Office.  We now have to remember to create new aliases on BT for every new user account we set up on our system,  but it does work!