What is a Mail box?

A mail box is storage for your emails.  When mail is sent to an email address it will ultimately end up in a mail box where it will stay until it is read by the mail box owner.

A mail box can store more than one message and can become full unless it is read regularly and managed by the owner.  Normally, this cleaning is done by the owner’s mail reader when they read their email.

Each mail box has associated with it a primary email address.  The mailbox is accessed by the mail reader supplying a user name and password and also a protocol.  The protocol can be either ‘POP3’ or ‘IMAP’.  Most mail readers support these protocols.  The protocols are simply a defined way to retrieve, store and manage the contents of the mail box.  Each protocol has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.  Our systems support both protocols and is down to the individual user to decide what is best for them.

Once a mail box has been created, users can also send electronic mail from our servers using the primary address of the mail box.  For example, if we create a mail box with a primary address of ‘example@iirc.co.uk’ then emails to ‘example@iirc.co.uk’ will be stored in that mail box until read.  The user of that mail box will also be able send mails from ‘example@iirc.co.uk’.

A mail box can also have other mail addresses associated with it, which are known as ‘Aliases’.  For example, our primary mail box of example@iirc.co.uk could also be known as ‘another_example@iirc.co.uk’, ‘yet another_example@iirc.co.uk’ and ‘how_many_more_examples_do_you_want@iirc.co.uk’ for example 🙂

We charge for the primary address, we do not charge for the aliases.  If you have a mail box with no aliases it will cost the same as a mail box with ten aliases.

Our systems support alias authentication so if you have an alias with your mail box, you will be able to send emails using that alias address as the sender.  This is useful where you want to be able to send email from a range of addresses, e.g. ‘sales@…’ or ‘support@…’ but only have one mail box.

Aliases are quite powerful, you can also have aliases that do not go to your mail box.  They can go to other aliases or other mail boxes or email addresses.  You could have ten mail boxes for ten employees and have an alias ‘sales@…’ that delivered mail to all of the employees.  If you are using gmail or hotmail for example, you can have an alias pointing to your gmail account and also your mail box so that mail to that alias goes to your mail box and to your gmail account.

Mail boxes cost £12.00 each per year + VAT. or £10.00 each per year + VAT for 5 or more.

Normally, there is no charge to set up an alias however we reserve the right to charge for ridiculous usage – e.g. you want more aliases than is reasonable.