If your email is hosted on the same plan as your website, the control panel is where mailboxes are created, passwords are set and forwarding is configured. This covers the decisions that matter and the mistakes that cause the most trouble.
Mailbox, alias or forwarder?
Three different things that are easy to confuse:
- A mailbox is real storage with its own password. It counts against your plan's account limit and its disk usage counts against your quota.
- An alias is another name that delivers into an existing mailbox. It costs nothing and needs no password. Use aliases for sales@, info@ and similar when one person reads them all.
- A forwarder sends mail on to an external address. Useful, but see the warning below.
Most people create far more mailboxes than they need. If two addresses are read by the same person, the second one should almost always be an alias.
The forwarding trap
Forwarding mail to an external provider breaks sender authentication. The forwarded message arrives at the destination with your server as the sending host but the original sender's address in the headers, which fails SPF checks and gets it classified as spam or rejected outright. If you need mail to reach an external inbox reliably, collect it there over IMAP or POP instead of forwarding, or use a forwarder that rewrites the envelope sender.
Setting a mailbox up on a device
You need four things: the incoming server name, the outgoing server name, the ports, and whether encryption is required. The control panel publishes these per mailbox — look for the configuration or connect-device option rather than guessing.
Two rules that prevent most setup failures:
- Use IMAP, not POP3, unless you have a specific reason. POP3 downloads and removes mail from the server, so it exists on exactly one device and is not in any server backup afterwards.
- The username is the full email address, not the part before the @ sign, on almost every modern host.
Quotas fill silently
A mailbox that reaches its quota stops accepting mail, and the sender gets a bounce you never see. Set a per-mailbox quota deliberately rather than leaving one mailbox able to consume the entire account, and check usage occasionally. Shared drafts, sent items and a decade of attachments add up faster than people expect.
Before you delete a mailbox
Deleting a mailbox deletes its mail. If anyone has been reading it over IMAP, that mail exists only on the server. Export it first, then delete.
If mail is not arriving
Check the mailbox quota, then check that the domain's MX records actually point at the mail server. A domain hosted with us can still have MX records aimed at a previous provider. See the article on DNS records for how to read them, and the one on SPF, DKIM and DMARC for delivery problems in the outbound direction.
