Support Start > Email > Email and Webmail Basics > Receiving Email

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Our service makes it easy to receive email. You can create email addresses that end with your domain name (such as “yourname@example.com”).

For each email address you create, you can choose to do one of two things:

• Store the incoming messages in your mailbox on our server until you read them using an email program such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, or our Webmail pages (this is called a mailbox); or

• Forward the messages to an existing mailbox you have somewhere else, like “example@hotmail.com” (this is called a forwarding address).

Creating email addresses

To create new addresses:

1. Login to the “My Account” control panel (having trouble?)
2. Click E-mail Options
3. Click Add Mailbox or Add Forwarding Address (depending on the type of address you're creating)
4. Your new address will begin working in about two minutes.

See our topics explaining how to create and use a mailbox or create a forwarding address for more details.

An example of using multiple email addresses

A hypothetical example might be useful if you're not sure how to proceed.

Imagine three people — Rob, Mollie and Charlotte — read email sent to example.com. Rob reads email using Outlook Express on his computer, Mollie reads email using our Webmail pages, and Charlotte wants all her email forwarded to her at example@hotmail.com.

In addition, Rob wants to receive all mail sent to webmaster@example.com, and Mollie and Charlotte both want to receive all mail sent to sales@example.com.

In this case, you need mailboxes for Rob and Mollie, because mailboxes allow you to read mail using a mail program or Webmail. For Charlotte, a forwarding address will send her mail to hotmail.com. Finally, additional forwarding addresses will handle the generic "webmaster" and "sales" addresses.

So you would first create these two mailboxes:

• rob@example.com
• mollie@example.com

Mail arriving for these addresses would wait on our server until you read it using your mail program or our Webmail system.

Then you would create these three forwarding addresses:

• charlotte@example.com forwards to example@hotmail.com
• sales@example.com forwards to both mollie@example.com and charlotte@example.com
• webmaster@example.com forwards to rob@example.com

Mail sent to any of these addresses would be immediately sent to the other addresses shown. (Note that mail sent to sales@example.com is first forwarded to charlotte@example.com, then to example@hotmail.com — multiple forwarding rules are perfectly okay.)

Our system is completely flexible. You can mix-and-match mailboxes and forwarding addresses as you wish, and you can change them at any time using the account management control panel.