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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.

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3 Answers 3

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As specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request For Comments (RFC) #2142, the proposed standards are specified. Link here:

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 there, you should have POSTMASTER@domain for each domain name on that server.

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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.

In 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.

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    Ironically, these common e-mail addresses have been defined is a trust metric. Still, I do not have these set either. There used to be checks to make sure these accounts exist at least once. Not sure if this is still happening- I doubt it. It is a requirement for domains for the Internet and at least one organization checked for these and reported failures to a blacklist. Not sure that is still happening, but it was 2 years ago. Mostly this blacklist was not used for blocking, but other uses and perhaps Google checks for valid registration via this blacklist. It used to periodically.
    – closetnoc
    Commented May 13, 2015 at 22:38
  • @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.
    – closetnoc
    Commented May 13, 2015 at 22:40
  • @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.
    – dhaupin
    Commented May 13, 2015 at 22:49
  • 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.
    – closetnoc
    Commented May 13, 2015 at 22:57
  • 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.
    – Steve
    Commented May 13, 2015 at 23:48
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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.

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  • ...upon reading the other answer, I guess we're saying pretty much the same thing.
    – Bryan C.
    Commented May 14, 2015 at 3:18

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