info@yourbusiness.com can work two completely different ways behind the scenes. Choosing the right one saves money — or headaches, depending on your situation.
Option 1: The hosted mailbox
A real mailbox on your domain, with its own storage, webmail, and IMAP access from your phone and desktop. Mail lives at your domain's provider.
Strengths: everything in one place, professional sending (your replies genuinely come from info@yourbusiness.com with proper authentication), storage under your control, clean continuity when staff changes — the mailbox belongs to the business.
Cost: a few euros per month per mailbox, scaling with storage (our plans run from 1GB to 25GB per account).
Option 2: The forwarder
No mailbox at all — just a rule: anything sent to info@yourbusiness.com gets redirected to, say, your existing Gmail. Free or nearly free.
Strengths: zero cost, zero new inboxes, receives perfectly.
The catches people discover later:
- Replying is the weak spot. You answer from your personal address (breaking the professional appearance) or configure "send as" — which, done casually, triggers the authentication problems from our SPF/DKIM guide and lands you in spam.
- No storage of its own — the business has no archive independent of that personal inbox.
- Continuity risk — the forward target is usually one person's account. Same fragility as running the business on free Gmail, just better disguised.
Option 3: The hybrid
The underrated middle path: hosted mailboxes for the addresses that send (you, sales, support) and forwarders for the ones that only receive (billing@, newsletter@, role addresses). You pay for real mailboxes only where sending and archiving matter.
How to choose in one minute
- Solo, replies can come from anywhere, budget zero → forwarder, eyes open.
- You send email as the business (quotes, invoices, support) → hosted mailbox. The sending problems of forwarders aren't worth the savings.
- Several addresses, few real senders → hybrid. Most of our clients land here once they see the map.
Whichever you pick, the authentication trio (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) must match the setup — a mismatch quietly costs you deliverability either way.
We run hosted, forwarded and hybrid setups for clients — and the portal shows each mailbox, its type and its storage at a glance. If you're not sure which you currently have: that's exactly the audit we do free.