Receiving email

Mail can arrive straight in your shared inbox, addressed to your own company. The sender's real address is kept, replies thread onto the same conversation, and nobody has to forward anything by hand.

You set it up under Settings → Email → Receiving. It is a team setting: a personal account has no shared inbox to file the post into.

Adding the domain

Under Add a receiving domain, enter your domain the way you would say it out loud: yourcompany.com. No https://, no www and no subdomain. The screen adds the subdomain itself, and what you get is:

inbox.yourcompany.com

That is the name mail is addressed to, and the name every record below hangs off.

The MX record goes on the subdomain, never on your bare domain

This is the one mistake on this page that genuinely does damage, so we will be blunt about it.

An MX record says: mail for this name is delivered here. Your company already has one on yourcompany.com, pointing at wherever your colleagues read their mail. Put ours there instead and every message to every colleague stops arriving in their mailbox and starts arriving here. Nothing warns you. From the next message onward, the mail simply goes to the wrong place.

On inbox.yourcompany.com that cannot happen. It is a name of its own, nobody's mailbox is behind it, and your existing mail never passes it. That is why the form asks for your bare domain and builds the subdomain for you.

The five records

The screen shows the exact values for your domain, in two groups.

Prove the domain is yours. Four records: three CNAME records with which our mail provider establishes that you control the domain, and one TXT record saying which of our customers that is. No mail arrives until all four are found.

Send the mail here. One MX record on inbox.yourcompany.com. Publish this one last, once the four above are in place. Mail that arrives earlier has nowhere to go.

If you also send from this domain, watch out: the return path for bounces sits on a subdomain of its own, and those two names must never be the same. One name cannot carry both, and whichever is published second wins silently.

Watching it go live

The card shows where your domain stands:

• Awaiting DNS. Registered here, the records have not been picked up yet.
• Being checked. We are watching. Either the records are not visible yet, or your TXT record is not published.
• Active. Both are true. Mail is arriving in your inbox.
• Stopped working. It worked and no longer does: one of the records is missing or has changed.

We look again every fifteen minutes on our own. Check now asks immediately, for when you have just published a record.

If a domain sits still for more than a few hours, it is usually one of three things: the TXT record was pasted without its prefix, the record name was entered in full in a panel that appends the domain itself, or a long value was cut off by your DNS panel.

What arrives

Anything addressed to your receiving domain lands in the shared inbox. That covers sales@, info@ and a name that does not exist yet. There is no list of allowed addresses to maintain.

Two limits are worth knowing. A message above 40 MB is refused before we see it, and the sender is told. A single attachment above roughly 10 MB is dropped while the message itself still arrives.

If you would rather not touch DNS

You do not have to. Every member has a forwarding address under Settings → Account → Mailbox and calendar. A message you forward to it lands in the shared inbox.

It is the easier start and the weaker one. A forwarded message has already been delivered to somebody's mailbox, so its original envelope is gone and the reply begins a new thread. Receiving on your own domain keeps both.