Forum Discussion
Forward/be notified of emails sent to nonexistent address on same domain? Not admin. School account.
My student email address (Outlook) contains a misspelling of my name (one missing letter). So it's very easy for people to send their emails to an address that doesn't exist, thinking they're sending it to me. What would be great if I could somehow have those emails forwarded to the correct address, or at least be notified when people try to send an email to the nonexistent address.
I've tested things a bit. When I try sending an email to the "wrong" (correct spelling of my name, but nonexistent) address, I usually get an email from Microsoft indicating the mistake. But not always. And even when I do, it sometimes takes a few minutes, or it goes to some easily overlooked folder besides the main inbox. I worry that busy people might send an email to the wrong address and move on, never noticing the following error email.
I know one obvious solution is to ask my school's IT department to make a new address with the correct spelling, and have all emails sent to the previous incorrectly-spelled address forwarded to the new one. But 1. I don't know if I'll be allowed to keep two addresses, and 2. I don't trust Outlook to successfully forward everything to the new address.
I'd rather use a "catch-all" solution, where emails sent to the correctly spelled (but nonexistent) address are automatically forwarded to the existing (but incorrectly spelled) address. Or maybe I can somehow get a notification that someone has tried to send an email to the nonexistent address? Are either of these (or something else I haven't thought of) possible?
Before taking this to my school's IT department, I want to see if there's anything I can do myself. Like I said, it's a student email address, so my options are probably limited. But I'm wondering if I have access to any settings (I mainly use the web version of Outlook, but I also have the PC app), or if there's any 3rd party solutions I can implement on my own that could accomplish something like what I have in mind.
If I do end up having to ask my school's IT department for help, what should I tell them to try?
3 Replies
Talk to your IT folks. There's nothing you can do about this without having administrative privileges for the domain(s) in question.
The easy solution is to correct your address, while keeping the existing ones as secondary aliases in order to avoid problems with people that already mailed you to the misspelled address. Each mailbox can have hundreds of aliases if needed.
As for "catch all" solution, there are some methods they can use, but in this day and age, the amount of spam they will have to deal with will likely be quite prohibitive for implementing those. Especially when talking about educational organizations.
I asked my school IT, and they said that while they can technically do it, they don't want to, because those alternate addresses may want to be used by another student (But I don't see why they can't have them as aliases temporarily, and remove them later if they need to).
Do I have any other options? It'd be nice if I could at least be notified if somebody tries to email one of the misspellings I was planning to add as aliases. Is there any way I can set it up so I get notified? Is the IT admin at least able to see when people attempt to send an email to one of those nonexisting addresses on their domain?
I tried setting up the aliases to have their emails forwarded to my personal Outlook, but it wouldn't let me add any addresses for a school or work domain. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume trying to do some similar solution using a different email provider (Gmail, for instance) would run into the same problem: I don't own the domain, and the email addresses (being nonexistent) would be impossible for me to verify... Unless, of course, the domain admin still receives the emails sent to nonexisting addresses, and could forward me the verification links.
I'm not clear on the difference between Outlook aliases and a catch-all solution. What sort of catch-all solution could I ask the IT department to try? If it's just an issue of me getting a lot of spam, I'm fine with that. I would rather get more emails than I need than miss important emails that are sent to the wrong address.
There's nothing you can do if the IT staff isn't willing to help. Though I don't see any reason why they would deny you adding few additional aliases, then again I'm now aware of their internal policies.
Any address associated with the domain can only be managed by admins from your organization, and you will not be able to use any other provider. The same goes for any "catch all" type solution.
