No, not bad emails as in the ones that you consider saving and posting for someone’s everlasting internet shame. Bad emails are the ones that go to the wrong place, through none of your fault. We’re talking about the people using an email you’ve not used in a decade, or someone who can’t remember your name is spelled with an A and not an E, and so on. You know, typos.
One of the things I did on my old email was set up a trash email box. That is, people could email not-me@domain.com or me@olddomain.com and they’d get an auto-reply telling them the email was no longer in service. It was more important for an old domain I owned but didn’t use and yet people I needed to talk to still thought it was real. I could have forwarded it to me, but after 10 years, I upgraded to the “Folks, seriously!” alert.
Doing this on cPanel was pretty easy, making a custom alias that dev/null’d and sent a reply. Doing it on Gmail was a little weirder and made me think about the situation.
Canned Replies
First you have to set up Canned Responses, which is a Lab (go to Gmail -> Settings -> Labs). You made a response like you make an email, only instead of sending it you save it by clicking on the down arrow and saving as a Canned Response:
Once you have it saved, set up a filter so any email to @domain.com gets a reply of that Canned.
Don’t Be Sneaky
If you’re thinking “Aha! I can use this to be sneaky!” with the intent of sending people emails to pretend you really are reading it, there is a problem with that. The email comes back from YOU+canned.response@example.com and no, there’s no really easy way around that. Someone did come up with a Google Script for it, but it’s not for the faint of heart.
Now the question is, is that a bad thing? Is it bad for people to know they got a canned reply? No, not really. By putting in the +canned.response it’s obvious that it’s a canned, but it’s also obvious for you and you can filter the emails however you want. People who reply to canned? Auto-trash ’em. Or block them.
Filters
Instead of the canned reply, though, you can also just discard the email. Either don’t even bother to set up the email (or it’s alias at all), or if you do, filter it out and dump it. The only reason I could see bothering to make an alias for email you don’t want is if you either plan to review it later, or if you have a catch all email address. If you do this, making an alias, make sure you filter the emails and mark them read so you don’t get distracted by them.
Catch All
There’s a slightly different approach to all this, though. The idea of a catch-all email. By default, G Suites sends all your misdirected emails to trash. Accidentally mailed bob@example.com instead of b0b@example.com because the numbers and letters look the same? Tough luck. Unless Bob was smart enough to set that up as an alias (which I tend to do), your email was lost. The alternative is to designate a user as a ‘catch all’ account that gets everything that doesn’t belong to an existing user.
That catch-all can auto-reply to all emails, forward ones that are important, and everything else. If you’re a business, you should do this so you don’t lose any misdirected emails from customers (they can’t spell after all), but remember to check that email often as it will also collect all the spam for all your accounts.
