I've been a satisfied customer for a long time, but I'm not happy about the recent change to email forwarding behavior, announced here:
http://forums.a2hosting.com/showthread.php?tid=107
First of all, I don't like the change itself, which breaks the way that I've handled my email. I had all @mydomain email forwarded to my gmail account. I could then use different aliases whenever I wanted, without worrying about setting things up. For example, Amazon emails went to amazon@mydomain, and I could manage them with a filter. However, if this change was absolutely necessary to prevent your systems from being overwhelmed with spam, I guess I'll tolerate it.
More importantly, this change should not have happened with no notice or warning. My email was unavailable for several days due to this change. You should have sent an email to everyone who would be affected by the change, and given us time to rearrange our setups.
I feel the same way. I love A2 hosting, but this was a real bozo move. Other than an obscure forum post, I don't know of any warning that the change was going to take place. I imagine many other people haven't even realized their accounts aren't working yet. Email notifications are the only semi-reliable way to reach users, we're not going to read the official forums on a regular basis.
We apologize and admittedly we dropped the ball here and should have done a better job notifying everybody. We will take this as a learning experience and make sure we do a better job in the future. We unfortunately did not realize it would affect as many people as it did. On the bright side it has made a huge difference in server and email stability on all of our servers and reduced server load spikes due to spam networks incredibly.
Also, if you absolutely need to have a default address set because this breaks your current email setup we have decided to allow it by manually setting it up for you. Submit a ticket if you need this. The only catch is if we catch your domain being targeted by a spambot using a dictionary attack we may have to not allow this for your account anymore.
Thanks, and again we apologize for not doing a better job communicating this policy change.
We apologize and admittedly we dropped the ball here and should have done a better job notifying everybody. We will take this as a learning experience and make sure we do a better job in the future.
I appreciate you guys stepping up and taking responsibility for this. Not to belabor a point, but it's a change I really wish I'd been aware of *before* I changed our MX records this weekend from our previous provider to A2. Since our last provider accepted catchall addresses, I'd used them extensively, so while I've set up as many manual forwards as I can think of off the top of my head, I really have no idea how much mail I'm going to lose while things are getting sorted out with support.
On a more constructive note, you should *really* update the tutorial video for catchall addresses in the help section: the video still tells you to use the "Default Address" link in the Mail section of cPanel, which link no longer exists. Also, consider adding something to the Knowledge Base about it that will come up in searches for "default address" and "catchall address," neither of which turns up anything in a search of the KB right now.
I'll talk with support about getting defaults set up manually on our domains--thanks for being willing to set that up for people on request!