The Downfall of a Catchall Email

I’ve been using a catchall email address for a while now. This is an email that you attach to a domain name so that you can receive any email sent to the domain. For example, say I set up a catchall email address on the domain www.email.com. That would mean that emails sent to eli@email.com, php@email.com, dudeprogramminglolz@email.com would all go to the same inbox. I have found this to be very handy because I can give different emails to everyone without additional work on my part, and know who they are just from the email they sent the message to.

Why is this important you ask? Why can’t I just read the message and figure it out? Lets say you register on Site A with Email A. You then receive a message from Site B from Email A. What you can then infer is that Site B received or gained your email address from Site A. If spam continues from that email address, instead of just having to make a new email altogether, you can simply block incoming messages on that email address. I have found this to be much more helpful than I originally thought.

The problem I have stumbled upon however is that once I receive all of my emails from my catchall email address in my Thunderbird inbox, if I try to reply to an email, it then sends a response email from a different email address than the one I received it on. That means that if I reply to an email I received from haxorz@bbq.com, it might be sent on ihrtspiders@hotmail.com instead of haxorz@bbq.com. After being unable to find a solution to this problem I have decided to make a simple web mail client. The required change for this problem is to simply modify a mail header when you send an email.