What is an Email Mailbox?
An Email Mailbox is an account that allows the receiving and sending of email using a unique email address.
This account requires a password.
The mailbox account stores everything it receives and sends and allows you to organise your emails into named folders.
For example; you might be called Fred who has a website company.co.uk so your Mailbox account could be fred@mycompany.co.uk
If for example an email is received from bill@customercompany.co.uk you can create a folder called ‘Customer Company’ and move the received email into that folder.
You are then able to compose and send a message to bill@customercompany.co.uk
When ‘Bill’ receives that message he sees it has come from fred@mycompany.co.uk
Why is a Mailbox preferable to a branded email address such as a Hotmail or Gmail address?
As you can see a mailbox allows your customers to receive an email branded as you and your company domain name e.g. fred@mycompany.co.uk
Multiple Mailboxes
If your company have multiple staff or departments each member of staff or department may require their own mailbox?
You can therefore create mailboxes for carol@mycompany.co.uk or mark@mycompany.co.uk or sales@mycompany.co.uk or marketing@mycompany.co.uk
Email Forward to a branded email address
An email forward is simply a redirect from an email address to another.
You could set up an email forward so fred@mycompany.co.uk forwards to fred@hotmail.co.uk.
However, if bill@customercompany.co.uk then sends an email to fred@mycompany.co.uk it gets forwarded to fred@hotmail.co.uk.
This means that when you reply to bill@customercompany.co.uk from Hotmail, Bill sees your address as fred@hotmail.co.uk.
Email Forward to a Mailbox
Setting up email addresses to forward to a mailbox is a good way of preventing the need for multiple Mailboxes.
For example you could set up sales@mycompany.co.uk and accounts@mycompany.co.uk and enquiries@mycompany.co.uk all to forward to your fred@mycompany.co.uk Mailbox.
This means that if bill@customercompany.co.uk sends an email to sales@mycompany.co.uk or accounts@mycompany.co.uk or enquiries@mycompany.co.uk they are all forwarded to the fred@mycompany.co.uk Mailbox.
When Fred replies to any of those emails he replies as fred@mycompany.co.uk
In summary
A mailbox is more ‘professional’ way of managing your emails that an email forward to a branded email.
You can have multiple mailboxes for staff and departments
Email forwards to a single mailbox can be effectively used to prevent having to have multiple mailboxes if your business does not require them.
