An email mailbox is an actual mailbox on the server.  It’s like a letterbox outside your house that mail gets dropped into.  It sits in the mailbox until you come along and collect it – and if you forget to check it, it will pile up until it gets full and mail delivery is terminated.  You can collect mail using mail programs such as Outlook, Outlook Express, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, etc.  You will need to set up your mail programme to access the mail box using POP3 or IMAP protocol.  We provide generic instructions on how to do this when we set up a mailbox.  Usually, when you receive an email through a mailbox and reply to it the reply will come from your hosted email address.

An email forwarder simply redirects mail sent to one email address to another email address.  It does not need an actual mailbox on the server (although you can do both forwarding and have a mailbox with the same name).  For example, if we host yourdomain.co.nz, we can forward email sent to jack@yourdomain.co.nz to any email address in the world, maybe jill@yourdomain.co.nz or jackandjill@gmail.com. Once the email arrives in your other mailbox you can read it as normal.  But if you reply, the reply will come from secondary mailbox, not the hosted domain mailbox.

We can also setup a default forwarder.  This means that if someone sends an address to john@yourdomain.co.nz (and there is no mailbox with that name) it will automatically be forwarded to jack@yourdomain.co.nz (or any other email address).  By default we don’t do this as you will most likely get more spam this way.