Are webmaster accounts required for non-email domains?

Question

I see that best-practice for domains using email should have a webmaster account (and the other normal accounts), but what if you don't have any email addresses for that domain? We have our primary business domain, but then we have subsites for other venues that are under our our control as well.

For instance the primary business is mainvenue.com. We also have parkvenue.com, yearlyevent.com, and majorevent.com (run every few years). Do I need a webmaster email setup for each of these domains? Also what if we have a domain that just redirects to our main website (e.g. secondaryvenue.com points to mainvenue.com/secondaryvenue). In all cases the contact email for employees are [email protected].

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Solution 1

The webmaster@ convention is simply a device where people might be contactable through a generic email address. It has nothing to do with using or not using email on a domain. My experience is that it was more widely used a few years ago than these days because it was thought to be a method to contact domain owners.

I the past I would set up webmaster@, postmaster@ and info@ for every domain, even if I didn't use the address. Over time I realised that in fact they never receive email and if they do it is spam, so I have stopped doing it.

Solution 2

As specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) Request For Comments(RFC) #2142, the proposed standards are specified. Link here: [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt]

If your domain uses DNS, HTTP and SMTP, then you should implement HOSTMASTER, POSTMASTER and WEBMASTER, as recommended by the RFC proposed standard.

If your server has SMTP, and your domains are hosted their, you should have POSTMASTER@domain for each domain name on that server.

RFC2142 is a proposed standard, not a legacy standard as Brayn C. suggests.

Solution 3

No. You do not need at webmaster@ e-mail account. The ONLY e-mail address you need to have related to any domain is a contact e-mail address, and it can be completely different than the domain that is registered.

postmaster@, webmaster@, administrator@, info@, etc... ... these are all legacy standards that were there as a uniform, convenient method to reach out to a server administrator when you had no idea of how to reach them pre-web and generally do nothing these days but collect spam.

Comments

[closetnoc]

@MikeWills Ahhhh... is this what you are asking?? I re-read your question and it seems to make sense. I will delete my answer after hearing back. Just trying to help. See my comment bellow.

[dhaupin]

@closetnoc postmaster@ is still required for some service/domain as a trust mark... I just can't remember which one. Might be AOL or Yahoo domain. Was somewhere in a random support doc.

[closetnoc]

Yes! Of course you are right. I was not clear when typing my message. Postmaster and whatever e-mails used to register the domain. I have postmaster turned off. These are the ones pinged in the trust metric. Ooopppsss!! I guess I failed that exam! The e-mail addresses in my registration do work with a ton of anti-spam hoops to jump through. The org used to check the registration information and postmaster to make sure that registrations are valid. I have not looked at this stuff in a long time though so I am not sure what the status is anymore. I will have to check this again sometime soon.

[Steve]

I think that the thing about is that as domains became such a commodity, so many people weren't setting up postmaster@ etc that the trust metric became meaningless.

[JamesLCQ]

...upon reading the other answer, I guess we're saying pretty much the same thing.

[MrWhite]

I thought abuse@ was also one of these "trust metrics". (?)

[Mike Wills]

@closetnoc Yes, I was asking about this. I already have the domains verified in Google Webmaster.

[Mike Wills]

@closetnoc Not a problem. I thought I made it clear, but we all know exactly what we are trying to ask, but can't always make it that clear to everyone else.

[closetnoc]

@w3d Abuse may be also. It has been at least 5 years since I did any work on this. These little side discussions are very good for the memory even if not right away! That is a topic I will have to get back to as I update my ranking and trust metrics. I was fairly generic on the topic by saying valid registration and e-mail contacts that respond, but will detail it more soon.

[closetnoc]

@MikeWills A swing and a miss for both of us then. We seldom get questions regarding e-mail anymore and especially these default accounts, but we do get Google WMT and Analytics as well as cPanel questions all the time so I guess my mind, being a rather simple fellow, went there first. It's kinda like being expected for dinner and showing up at the wrong house.