Whats a mailbox?

Many people ask us the difference between a

mailbox
mail mapping
mail redirection
mail forwarding

The bottom three are different terms for the same thing - the mail is not stored on the server but forwarded, redirected or mapped to a mailbox that exists to collect your mail.

A mailbox accepts email sent to it and stores the email until you come along and say "Send me all my mail". Every mailbox has a unque identifier (username) which enables you to retreive your mail.

You can have a single mailbox set up to collect your mail but have multiple email addresses which forward mail to your mailbox. For example I could have a mailbox with Xtra to take advantage of their SPAM filtering - say this mailbox is called spiralmail and I can send mail to it via spiralmail@xtra.co.nz. We have our own domain name so I can set up
audrey@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
info@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
sales@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey.shearer@spiral.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey@spiralwebdesign.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
audrey@spiralweb.co.nz to forward to spiralmail@xtra.co.nz
etc

This provides me with many different email addresses yet keeps it simple for picking up my mail.

While we are on mail - Whats POP?

Local e-mail clients use the Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3 or just POP). This is an application-layer Internet standard protocol, to retrieve e-mail from a remote server over a TCP/IP connection. Nearly all subscribers to individual Internet service provider e-mail accounts access their e-mail with client software that uses POP3.

You can read more about email on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail

« Back to Articles & Tips