Email: Where to Start

How email at your own domain works on KapsuleHost, the difference between a mailbox and the four cheaper things that look like one, and which guide to read for each job.

Email lives under Email in the KPanel sidebar. Its sub-navigation is Mailboxes, Forwarders, Mailing Lists, Shared Inboxes and Distribution groups, plus an Import option for bringing mail across from another provider. This page explains what each of those actually is, because choosing the wrong one is the single most common email mistake.

Mailbox, Alias, Forwarder, Group, Shared Inbox

They all give you an address at your domain. They are not interchangeable.

Thing	Has storage	Has a login	Use it for
Mailbox	Yes	Yes	A real person who needs to send and receive
Alias	No	No	Extra addresses that land in an existing mailbox
Forwarder	No	No	Sending mail on to an address somewhere else
Distribution group	No	No	One address that fans out to several recipients
Shared inbox	Yes	Shared	A team working a queue together, like support@

The practical rule: create one mailbox per person, then use aliases for the extra hats that person wears. info@, sales@ and accounts@ almost never need to be separate mailboxes. A distribution group is the right answer when one address must reach several different people. A shared inbox is right when several people need to work the same conversation and see what each other has replied.

See Setting Up Your Mailbox, Email Aliases, Email Forwarding, Distribution Groups and Shared Inboxes.

Getting Your First Address Working

Have the domain on your account and using our nameservers. Nameservers.
Create the mailbox under Email. Setting Up Your Mailbox.
Check the mailbox's Deliverability tab and publish everything it asks for.
Sign in to webmail to confirm it works. Webmail.
Add it to your phone and desktop. Email Client Setup and Mobile Setup.

If your domain uses our nameservers, the mail records are handled for you. If your DNS is somewhere else, the Deliverability tab shows the exact records to publish there, and we deliberately do not overwrite mail records you already run. Nothing arrives until they are in place.

Deliverability Is Not Optional

Open a mailbox and you get tabs for Setup, Aliases, Autoresponder, Spam filter, Filters, Deliverability, Password and Activity. The one to read first is Deliverability. It checks your domain's authentication records and scores them.

Three records decide whether the rest of the world trusts your mail:

SPF lists which servers may send for your domain.
DKIM signs each message so a receiver can verify it was not altered and really came from you.
DMARC tells receivers what to do when the other two fail, and asks for reports.

Without them your mail lands in spam folders, and there is no support ticket that fixes that other than publishing the records. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

Set DMARC to a monitoring policy first and read the reports for a couple of weeks before you tighten it. Going straight to a strict policy is how legitimate mail from your accounting software or your newsletter tool quietly starts failing.

Reading Your Mail

Webmail works from any browser with nothing to install. Webmail.

A mail client on your phone or computer uses IMAP. Choose IMAP, not POP3, unless you have a specific reason: IMAP keeps every device in sync with the server, POP3 downloads to one device and traditionally removes the mail from the server. See IMAP vs POP3, Email Client Setup and Mobile Setup.

When Mail Does Not Arrive

Work in this order rather than guessing:

Is the domain's MX record correct and pointing at us? MX Records.
Is the mailbox full? A full mailbox rejects new mail. Mailbox Full.
Is it in the spam folder or caught by a filter on the mailbox?
Does the sender have a bounce message? The code in it says exactly what happened. Bounce Codes.

Full walkthrough: Email Not Receiving.

When Your Mail Is Not Being Delivered to Others

Different problem, different fixes. Start with the Deliverability tab, then:

Sending Limits if you are sending in volume.
Blacklist Delisting if a receiver names a blocklist.
Spam Sent From Your Domain if the cause is a compromised account, which is the usual reason a domain suddenly starts being rejected everywhere.

Bringing Existing Mail Across

The Import option under Email copies mail from another provider into a Kapsule mailbox, and there is a dedicated email migration path with its own progress monitor. See Importing Mail and Email Migration.

Do not change your MX records to point at us before the mailboxes exist here. Mail sent in the gap has nowhere to be delivered, and it does not queue politely forever.

Other Things People Ask About

Catch-all. Accepts anything at your domain. Convenient, and a magnet for spam. Catch-All Addresses.
Mailing lists. For sending to subscribers rather than routing between staff. Mailing Lists.
Autoresponder and filters. On the mailbox's own tabs.
Lost the mailbox password. Reset it from the Password tab, or from the mailbox password recovery page if you cannot get into the panel. Setting Up Your Mailbox.