Beginner's Guide to Email

In addition to a website, you often want to use your own email address. In this overview, we explain the steps involved in setting up your own email address and making sure you can add mail to various email clients. Before we start with this, it is important to know who the domain's mail server is.

For illustration purposes, we use the domain cloud86example.com always replace it with your own domain in question. The domain is whatever is behind the @ sign in the mail address (@cloud86example.com) or entered in the url bar in the browser (after https://www. or https://).

Where does my mail arrive?

The MX record in the DNS determines which mail server receives the mail. Even though there is only one mail server that receives mail from your domain, you can send mail from multiple places. If you use our mail servers, the MX record must refer to the ip address of the mailserver. You can find this address in My Cloud86 at the details of the hosting package and also in Plesk at the overview of Websites & Domains.

If you host the website and mail at Cloud86, the ip address of the website and mail will be the same. If you do not host the website at Cloud86, but you do host the mail, then you will have different ip addresses for the website and mail.

Note: do you use Google or Microsoft 365 services? Then the mail does not go through us, but through their servers and you will also have to look at their documentation in case of problems. If you purchase Microsoft365 from us, go to the manual Beginner's Guide to Microsoft 365.

Creating and securing a new email address

Now that we know where the incoming mail server is, we can create a mail address in Plesk.

After creating an email address, we will also need to set up some protections. By default we create an SPF record in the DNS Zone. With this SPF record you can indicate which mail servers are allowed to mail with your domain name. Besides the SPF record, many receiving mail servers also ask for a DKIM record. DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail and, in short, it significantly reduces the chance that the mail you send will be marked as spam.

With this, we created a mail address, protected it and thus reduced the chances of other mail servers considering our message as unwanted (spam).

Mailing through the Webmail

If you have created an email address then you can access it online using the browser with the url webmail.<domain>. If we use our test domain then you will get the link webmail.cloud86example.com In our example we are using the cloud86example.com test domain, always replace this with your own domain. If you go to the webmail link then the username is the email address and password known to you. If you don't remember the password, you can change it at the same place where you created the email address, see also our manual (link).

In the webmail you can send and view the emails if the mail server is configured properly. There you can also set up an automatic signature for sending mail.

Linking mail to an email client

Now that we have created a mail account, you probably want to send and receive it directly from a mail program. There are many different types of mail programs and we have a manual available for the most common ones. Below we distinguish between Windows and Mac (Apple). Is yours not listed? Then you can use the General IMAP and SMTP settings to add the mailbox.

General

Windows

Mac

Using email features

FAQ and Troubleshooting