How to set up your first email address

An email address at your own domain — you@yourdomain.com rather than a free personal address — is one of the first things worth setting up once hosting and a domain are connected. It takes a few minutes, and this covers the whole process from creating the mailbox to actually reading mail in it.

Before you start: is the domain ready for email?

Email needs the domain's DNS to be pointing correctly, specifically its MX records, which tell the wider internet where mail for that domain should be delivered. If you changed nameservers to point the domain at this hosting account, the mail records are usually created automatically alongside the mailbox. If the domain's DNS is managed somewhere else entirely, mail records may need adding there separately — worth confirming before you assume a mailbox that will not receive anything is broken.

Creating the mailbox

1. Open the email section of your control panel

   This is where mailboxes for your domain are created and managed, separate from the domain and file sections.

2. Choose the address

   Pick whatever goes before the @ — common choices are a name, a role such as info or hello, or a department. You can create more than one, up to whatever limit your plan allows.

3. Set a strong password

   Use a unique password rather than reusing one from elsewhere. This mailbox will hold potentially sensitive correspondence, and a weak or reused password is one of the more common ways an account is compromised.

4. Set a storage quota

   Mailboxes draw from your account's overall storage allowance. A sensible quota per mailbox, rather than an unlimited one, keeps one busy inbox from quietly consuming space needed elsewhere on the account. See what is a mailbox quota for more on sizing this.

5. Save, and the mailbox is live

   Creation is usually immediate. Mail sent to the address from that point on should start arriving.

Where to actually read the mail

You have two broad choices, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Webmail

Every mailbox can be read through a webmail interface in a browser, with no setup required beyond the mailbox existing. It is the fastest way to confirm a new mailbox is working, and a reasonable permanent option if you do not want a dedicated mail app. See how to use webmail for logging in and finding your way around.

A desktop or phone mail app

Connecting the mailbox to an app such as Outlook, Apple Mail or the mail app on a phone means your messages show up alongside any other accounts you already use, with proper notifications rather than needing to check a separate tab. Setting this up needs your mail server settings, which the control panel shows for the mailbox — usually IMAP for reading (so mail stays on the server and is visible from more than one device) rather than POP3 (which typically downloads and removes it). Setting up email in Gmail is one worked example if you want to use Gmail's interface for a domain mailbox.

Confirming it actually works

Send a test message from an address outside the hosting account — a personal Gmail address is fine — to the new mailbox, and reply from the new mailbox back to it. That confirms both directions: mail arriving and mail being sent out successfully, which is worth checking before you put the address on a business card or a contact form.

If mail is not arriving

The two most common causes for a brand new mailbox are DNS that has not finished pointing at this hosting account yet, and MX records that were never updated because the domain's DNS is managed somewhere other than here. Give DNS a few hours if you changed it recently, then check the MX records shown in your control panel against what is actually published for the domain if the problem continues.

If everything looks correctly configured and mail still is not arriving, contact support with the mailbox address and we can check delivery from our side.