Addresses are not accounts, so we do not bill them like accounts. How aliases work, why you can send from them and not just receive, what a catch-all really costs you, and the alias-domain feature that makes rebrands and acquisitions boring.
Every company accumulates addresses. There is the one on your business card, the one on the invoices, the info@ that the website form posts to, the old domain from before the rebrand that two important customers still use, and the address a single supplier's billing system has hardcoded and will never update.
Most providers make you pay for those. An address is an account, an account is a seat, and a company of eight people ends up buying fourteen licences to hold seven addresses and a leftover domain. We think that is a billing model dressed up as a product decision, so aliases at email.eu are free, and there is no limit on them.
This post is how they work, including the parts that are more interesting than "you can have more addresses".
An alias is another address that lands in a mailbox you already have. There is no second inbox, no second password, no second thing to check. Mail to sales@yourcompany.eu arrives in the inbox of whoever owns it, alongside everything else.
The part people expect to be missing is sending. An alias that can only receive is half a feature: you get the enquiry at sales@, you reply, and your reply goes out from your personal address, which quietly tells the customer that sales@ is a fiction. So every alias you add is also registered as an address you can send from. Pick it in the From field in webmail and the conversation stays where the customer started it.
We bill for people, not addresses. A seat is a colleague. If your eight people need thirty addresses between them, that is eight seats.
Three things in this workspace look similar and are not, so it is worth having them side by side once:
| Mailbox | Alias | Forward | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Costs a seat | Yes | No | No |
| Has its own inbox and password | Yes | No | No |
| Can send from the address | Yes | Yes | No |
| Delivers to | Itself | An existing mailbox of yours | Any address, anywhere |
| Right for | A colleague | A role your team answers | An address that belongs to someone outside the company |
The rest of this post is the middle column.
A catch-all takes everything sent to your domain that does not match a real address and delivers it somewhere rather than bouncing it. It is genuinely useful when you have just migrated and are not yet certain you have recreated every address people use.
It is also the one alias setting we do not let an individual set for themselves. A catch-all is not a property of one mailbox, it is a routing rule for your entire domain, and the person who turns it on is deciding where every mistyped and every guessed address in the company ends up. That belongs to an owner or an admin, so that is who can set it.
Worth knowing before you turn it on: a catch-all receives everything, and "everything" includes the spam that comes from a bot guessing address after address at your domain. It is a good migration safety net and a mediocre permanent setting. Most teams use it for a few months and then switch it off once the real addresses have proven themselves.
This is the feature that surprises people, and it is the one worth reading this post for.
You can add a domain to your workspace as an alias domain. It is not a second workspace, and it does not create a single account. It mirrors the workspace you already have: everyone who has an address on your main domain automatically has the same address on the alias domain too. Ten colleagues and one alias domain gives you twenty working addresses, and you added one thing.
This is what makes rebrands and acquisitions boring, which is the highest compliment you can pay an email feature. You keep oldcompany.com as an alias domain forever, everyone's old address keeps working forever, nobody has to audit which customers still use which address, and you are not paying for a second set of mailboxes to catch the stragglers.
Those mirrored addresses are derived rather than stored, which means they follow reality on their own. Hire someone next year and their address on the alias domain exists the moment their mailbox does. Nobody has to remember to go back and set it up.
Two rules keep that from getting messy. If an address on the alias domain is already a real mailbox or already somebody's alias, the mirror leaves it alone rather than fighting over it. And if two colleagues happen to share a local part across domains, only one of them gets the mirrored address, deterministically, so two people never both believe they own it.
An alias touches three separate things, and it is worth knowing they exist because it explains the one behaviour that can look like a bug.
Delivery is resolved against your workspace directory, the same directory that decides who can log in. That is what makes mail to the alias actually arrive, rather than falling through to the catch-all. The mail server also keeps its own record of the address, which is what login and the admin views read. And the address is registered as an identity, so it appears as something you can send from.
We write all three every time you add, change or remove an alias, and the whole set is replaced rather than patched, so what the systems believe is always the current truth rather than an accumulation of past edits.
The honest caveat: the mail server caches directory lookups. A brand-new alias can take a few minutes before it starts receiving, especially if something already tried that address and got a "no such user" answer worth caching. If you add an alias and test it in the same breath, give it a moment before concluding it did not work.
The reason we care about this one is not that aliases are exciting. It is that address sprawl is one of the main reasons people stay somewhere they have outgrown. If leaving means auditing every address your company has ever published, and then paying per address to recreate them, you do not leave.
Making aliases free and whole domains mirrorable removes that. You bring everything, including the addresses you are not sure anyone still uses, and you find out later, safely.
Aliases and alias domains are on every plan. If you want to talk through a specific mess of domains before moving, we are happy to look at it with you.