Business email: mailboxes, aliases and what a team actually needs

An email address on your own domain, such as maria@mariaskitchen.com, tells customers they are dealing with an established business. It also means your email stays yours: if you change providers, you keep the address.

When owners set up business email, the same questions come up. How many addresses do we need? What is the difference between a mailbox and an alias? Does everyone need their own? Here are straightforward answers.

Mailboxes and aliases

A mailbox is a real account with its own storage and its own password. You sign in to it, and it holds your messages, sent mail and folders.

An alias is an extra address that delivers into a mailbox that already exists. It has no storage or password of its own. If orders@yourbusiness.com is an alias for maria@yourbusiness.com, anything sent to orders@ lands in Maria’s inbox.

Aliases are useful for addresses that describe a role rather than a person: info@, orders@, bookings@, billing@. They let you publish a sensible address on your website and invoices without paying for a separate mailbox for each one.

How many mailboxes do you need?

A good rule of thumb: one mailbox per person who needs to send email as themselves, plus aliases for the roles.

For a small team, that often looks like this:

• A mailbox for each owner or staff member who emails customers or suppliers
• Aliases such as info@ or hello@ that deliver to whoever handles general inquiries
• Perhaps an alias for invoices or bookings that delivers to the person responsible

Sharing one mailbox and one password among several people is tempting, but it causes problems. You cannot tell who sent what, you cannot remove one person’s access without changing the password for everyone, and a single leaked password exposes everything.

When a person leaves

Plan for this before it happens. With personal mailboxes and role aliases, it is simple: point the aliases at someone else, and either keep the departing person’s mailbox for a while so nothing is lost, or forward it to a colleague. Customers who wrote to info@ never notice a change.

This is one of the strongest reasons to publish role addresses rather than personal ones on your website.

Storage: how much is enough?

Most people use far less storage than they fear, unless they keep years of large attachments. Photos, scanned documents and design files fill a mailbox much faster than ordinary messages. If someone in your team handles a lot of attachments, give that mailbox more room and leave the others as they are.

It is also worth a yearly clear-out of large old attachments. Saving important files somewhere more suitable, such as shared storage, is better than keeping everything in email.

Using email on your phone and computer

Business email should work with the apps you already use, such as the mail app on your phone or a desktop program. Most do this through two standard protocols: IMAP for reading mail and SMTP for sending it. With IMAP, your messages stay on the server, so what you read or file on your phone looks the same on your computer.

If your provider supports app passwords, use one for each device. If a phone is lost, you can cancel that one password without changing everything else.

Keeping your email trustworthy

Mail providers have become strict about checking that email really comes from the domain it claims to come from. Three settings, published in your domain’s DNS records, do most of the work:

• SPF lists the servers allowed to send email for your domain.
• DKIM adds a signature to each message that receiving servers can check.
• DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with messages that fail those checks, and where to send reports.

You do not need to understand the details, but you should make sure whoever sets up your email configures all three. Large mail providers publish guidelines for senders, and messages from domains without them are more likely to land in spam or be rejected.

A word on sending to lists

Business email is for conversations: customers, suppliers, colleagues. Sending newsletters or promotions to large lists from an ordinary mailbox is a common way to get a domain’s email blocked. Most email services, including ours, do not allow unsolicited bulk mail. If you want to send a regular newsletter, use a service built for it, and only send to people who have asked to receive it.

Putting it together

For most small businesses, a sensible setup is: a mailbox for each person, a few role aliases published on the website, SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, and each device connected with its own app password. It is simple to run, easy to change when your team changes, and it keeps your messages out of spam folders.

If you’d like help setting up business email on your domain, we’re happy to talk it through.