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The short answer: forwarding your domain mail to a personal Gmail or Hotmail looks like the simplest way to have everything in one place, but it comes at a cost: messages landing in spam or bouncing, replies leaving from the personal address, and company mail stored in one person’s account. Reading the domain mailbox directly, over IMAP in an app or in webmail, avoids all of that, and the same phone app can show both accounts side by side.
The two ways
| Point | Forwarding to Gmail or Hotmail | Reading the domain mailbox |
| Where the mail is | A copy goes on to another provider, under its rules. | It stays on our server and is read in an app or in webmail. |
| Reaching the inbox | The receiving provider gets third-party messages sent by our server, and some go to spam or bounce: why SPF breaks. | The message is delivered once, with no extra hop on the way. |
| Replying | The reply leaves from the personal address, unless you set up sending as the domain address through our SMTP server. | The reply leaves from the domain address, with the company signature. |
| Copies and space | If the address also has a mailbox, it keeps a copy of everything and fills up with nobody opening it. | A single copy, where you read it. |
| When someone leaves | The company’s mail stays in that person’s personal account. | The mail stays in the company mailbox. Change the password and that is it. |
| What it depends on | Another provider’s rules, which change: Gmail has already stopped fetching mail from other mailboxes. | Open standards (IMAP and SMTP) that every app speaks. |
Moving from forwarding to reading directly
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| Forwarding to a personal account puts company mail outside the company: invoices, customer data, and the password-reset messages for the company’s services. If that personal account is broken into or the person leaves, the company loses control of all of it. |
| If you want to keep a forwarder just to be alerted, put it on a role address and leave the domain mailbox as the place where mail is kept and replies are sent from. |
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Want to move from forwarding to the mailbox and not sure where to start? Tell us the address and where it forwards to today. Open a support ticket |
Where to see it in your account
- Webmail. In cPanel, open Email Accounts and use the Check Email button next to the mailbox: it opens webmail already signed in.
- IMAP and SMTP details. The button for the mail client settings (Connect Devices) on the same page shows the server names, the ports and the user name, which is the full e-mail address.
- Space per mailbox. Each mailbox has its own quota, set on the Email Accounts page, but they all share the plan's space (10 GB on Pro up to 200 GB on Business Ultra). The Statistics sidebar shows the total in use.
- Forwarder. In the Email section open Forwarders, add the address and the destination. Remember that a forwarder to Gmail or Hotmail has the drawbacks this article describes, so test with one message.
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