Blog / friday roundup
The questions we get about business email
Seven questions our support queue gets about business email on your own domain: IMAP or POP, aliases, forwarding, catch-all, quotas and moving mail.
Website questions vary a lot. Email questions do not. The same seven come through our helpdesk most weeks, usually from someone who inherited a mailbox setup nobody documented. Here are the answers we give, written the way we would say them on a ticket.
IMAP or POP?
IMAP, in almost every case. POP downloads mail to one device and, with the default settings in most mail apps, deletes it from the server afterwards. That is how a person loses eleven years of mail when a laptop dies. IMAP leaves the mailbox on the server, so the phone, the desktop and webmail all show the same folders, and a backup on our side is worth something.
What is the difference between an alias and a mailbox?
A mailbox is storage plus a login. An alias (cPanel calls them forwarders) is just a label that points somewhere else, with no password and no disk use of its own. Addresses like info@ or accounts@ are usually better as aliases pointing at a real person's mailbox. Our rule of thumb: if two people need to read it and reply from it, it needs to be a real mailbox, not an alias.
Can I forward everything to my personal address?
You can, and it works until the day it doesn't. Forwarded mail arrives at the receiving provider with your server in the delivery path, so any spam that slips through your filters and gets passed along is counted partly against you. SPF also breaks on plain forwarding, because the message now comes from a server the original sender never authorized. If the goal is reading work mail on a phone, add the mailbox to the phone over IMAP instead. That took us about two minutes to set up the last time someone asked.
Should I turn on a catch-all?
No. A catch-all accepts mail for every address at your domain, including the thousands a spammer generates by walking through common names. We have seen a quiet catch-all mailbox take in forty thousand messages in a week. It also hides your own typos: the address printed wrong on a van or a flyer keeps working, so nobody notices it is wrong. Create the addresses you actually use and let the rest bounce, so senders are told the address does not exist.
Why did my mailbox stop receiving mail?
Quota, nine times out of ten. Sent items are the usual culprit, because every large attachment you have ever emailed is still sitting in that folder, on the server, counting against the same limit as the inbox. Check the usage figure in cPanel or webmail before you assume anything is broken. If the mailbox is genuinely full, clearing old sent mail and emptying the trash folder normally restores delivery within minutes.
Why does mail from my website's contact form land in spam?
Because most forms hand the message to the web server's local mail function, which sends unauthenticated, from an address it has no permission to use. Filters at the receiving end treat that exactly as it looks. The fix is to make the site send through a real mailbox using SMTP authentication, with the From address on your own domain and the visitor's address in Reply-To. If your enquiries have been vanishing, our piece on why business email lands in spam covers the DNS side, and the SPF and DKIM walkthrough has the records themselves.
What happens to email when the website moves?
Mail and web are separate DNS records, so they can move at different times, and they should. We lower the TTL a day ahead, copy the mailboxes across over IMAP while the old ones are still live, then change the MX records once the copy is verified. Old mailboxes stay reachable at your previous provider for a few weeks afterwards, which catches the stragglers that were sitting in a queue somewhere. Mail loss during a move is almost always a sequencing problem, not a technical one.
None of this is complicated once someone shows you which setting does what, and that is the part most people never get. If any of the above sounds like your setup, open a ticket with our support team and we will look at the actual mailbox rather than guess. Our business email hosting runs on the same cPanel servers as the sites, so it is one login and one place to check.