Creating mailboxes, forwarding and spam settings in Plesk
By Datafex Engineering TeamPublished 5 min read
Email on your own domain is the most used and least read part of a hosting plan. Creating the mailbox takes a minute; getting the message to the other side without landing in spam depends on three separate settings being right. Below is how to put them in order on the Plesk-based web hosting plans.
Decide first: a mailbox, an alias or a forward?
Three different things sit on the same screen, so they get mixed up and the plan's quota is spent for nothing.
| What | What it does | Does it use quota |
|---|---|---|
| Mailbox | A real address with its own password and storage | Yes, it counts against the mailbox limit |
| Alias | A second address for the same mailbox | No |
| Forward | Passes incoming mail on to another address | Can be set up without a mailbox |
The practical rule: do not open separate mailboxes for addresses like info@ and contact@ that reach the same person — define an alias. How many mailboxes your plan allows and how large each one may be is shown on the service detail page in your customer panel and in Plesk.
While creating the mailbox
Enter the panel with the Open Plesk panel button in your customer panel and go to the mail section of your domain. Three things deserve attention:
- Set the password yourself and have the user change it at first login; mailboxes are compromised through weak passwords more than anything else.
- Set the mailbox size below the plan's ceiling instead of leaving it unlimited — an unlimited mailbox lets one account eat the plan's whole disk allowance.
- Once the mailbox exists, send and receive a test message through webmail. If something is wrong, see it today rather than through a customer three months from now.
Forwarding and auto-replies
A forward passes a copy of incoming mail to another address. Two details matter. You can choose whether a copy also stays in the mailbox, and if it does not, the account never builds an archive. Second, forwards to outside providers are sometimes treated as spam by the receiving side, so test a permanent forward to a corporate address once before relying on it.
The auto-reply lives on the same screen, for holidays and handovers. Do not forget the end date; auto-replies waiting to be switched off run for months.
Setting it up on a phone and a desktop: IMAP or POP3?
If you will use the account on a computer and a phone at the same time, choose IMAP: mail stays on the server and something read on one device shows as read on the other. POP3 downloads mail to the device and removes it from the server; outside single-device setups that are pressing against a mailbox quota, it is no longer the right choice.
Do not guess the server name, port and encryption settings; the panel publishes them per mailbox as a ready configuration guide. Never turn encryption off for the connection — an unencrypted mail session sends your password across the network in the clear.
Spam filter: mark it, do not delete it
The spam filter is enabled per mailbox and can work in two ways: delete suspected mail outright, or mark it and drop it into a separate folder. Do not use the delete option in the first months. While the filter is learning it produces false positives, and deleted mail does not come back; with marking you see the misclassification in the folder and correct the filter.
The filter's allow and block lists are on the same screen. When one sender is repeatedly misclassified, adding that address to the allow list is better than loosening the filter's threshold for everyone.
If your outgoing mail lands in spam
The problem is usually not the filter but your domain's identity records. The three work together:
- SPF is a DNS record naming which servers may send mail on behalf of your domain. It has to cover both the hosting server and your newsletter service, if you have one.
- DKIM signs outgoing mail; the recipient verifies the signature against the public key in DNS. It is switched on from the panel's mail settings.
- DMARC tells the recipient what to do when the first two do not hold. Start it in reporting-only mode, then tighten it.
These records live on the DNS side; where your domain's records are managed and how long a change takes to spread is covered in pointing a domain at your hosting.
If your mail is with another provider
Setups where the site is here and the mail is elsewhere hide a classic trap: repointing the MX records is not enough. As long as the mail service stays enabled for that domain in the panel, mail sent from the same server to that domain is delivered to the local mailbox instead of going out — so the notification from your site's contact form simply disappears. If you moved mail out, turn the domain's mail service off in the panel.
Mailboxes consume disk
The space mailboxes use comes out of the plan's NVMe disk allowance, and attachments make it grow faster than expected. What to do as you approach the disk limit is collected in when the disk or traffic limit fills up. Running your own server purely for email, on the other hand, is rarely the right call; who runs the mail and how the two compare on price puts numbers on that decision.