Several domains, one inbox

Why domains multiply

They arrive for good reasons. A second brand, a country-specific domain for a market where a .fr or a .de matters, a shortened domain for links, an old company name whose customers still write to it, a project that was going to be a separate business. Each one comes with at least one address, and each address comes with the assumption that somebody is reading it.

The failure is quiet. Nobody decides to stop reading hello@old-brand.com; it just becomes the mailbox you log into when you remember, and by then a message is three weeks old. The cost is invisible until a customer mentions that they wrote twice.

Put them in one list, keep them separate on the way out

Mailbind connects each domain’s mailbox over IMAP, whoever hosts it — one at OVHcloud, one at IONOS, one at Google, one on a server you maintain — and shows them in one list. Search, rules, snooze and smart folders then cover every domain at once, which is the part no single provider can do for you.

Outgoing mail stays separate, which is the whole point. A reply leaves from the address that received it, through that domain’s own SMTP server, so SPF and DKIM alignment for that domain is exactly as it was and the brand’s mail keeps its own reputation.

• A colour and a name per mailbox, so the list reads as a list of brands.
• A signature per address, because two brands rarely sign off the same way.
• Verified aliases, for the three addresses that all land in one mailbox.
• A smart folder per domain if you want a brand’s mail in one view on demand.

The catch-all question

Many people point a catch-all at a domain so that anything@domain arrives. It is convenient and it is a spam magnet, and in Mailbind it behaves like any other mailbox: connect it once, and mail to every address on the domain appears in the list.

What a catch-all cannot do by itself is answer correctly. Mailbind reads the recipient headers to work out which address a message arrived at, and if you add and verify that address, the reply leaves from it. Where an address cannot be verified, Mailbind sends from the mailbox’s own address instead of forging one — a reply that fails a DMARC check at the other end is worse than a reply from a slightly unexpected address.

A worked arrangement

1. 1List the domains that actually receive mail, and find the mailbox behind each. A domain with only a forwarding rule has no mailbox to connect.
2. 2Connect each mailbox; Mailbind reads the MX records as you type the address and usually names the provider itself.
3. 3Add the aliases that arrive in each one and verify them with the code.
4. 4Write the signature for each address.
5. 5Add a rule for the catch-all noise, and a smart folder for the addresses that matter.
6. 6Check the list for a week. Then decide which domains deserve to keep receiving mail at all — reading them together is also the fastest way to find out which ones are dead.

Common questions

Keep reading

• All use cases
• Manage multiple email accounts
• Always reply from the right address
• Send from the right address
• Connect a mailbox
• For freelancers