How to create a professional email address

An address on your own domain is one of the cheapest credibility improvements available to a small business. It also means you own the address: if you change provider, you keep it, which is not true of a free mailbox tied to somebody else's platform.

Mailboxes are included with hosting plans, and PowrMail is available on its own from €7 a month if you want mail without hosting a site. Either way the mailbox sits in EU Tier-III data centres.

Before you start

• Your domain needs to be pointing at HostPowr, or at minimum have its MX records pointing here.
• Decide the addresses you actually need. Two or three real mailboxes plus aliases is usually better than eight mailboxes nobody checks.
• If you are moving from another provider, do not delete the old mailboxes until the new ones have been receiving mail for a week.

Steps

1. In cPanel, open Email Accounts.
2. Click Create.
3. Enter the address you want, for example hello@yourdomain.com.
4. Set a strong password — mailboxes are attacked constantly and a weak one gets your domain used for spam.
5. Choose a storage quota, or leave it unlimited if the plan allows.
6. Click Create, then use Connect Devices for the automatic configuration file, or configure your client manually with mail.yourdomain.com over IMAP on port 993 and SMTP on port 465.

Check that it worked

• Send a message from the new address to an outside account — a personal Gmail or Outlook address works well.
• Check that it arrives in the inbox rather than the spam folder. If it lands in spam, your SPF and DKIM records need attention.
• Reply from the outside account and confirm it arrives back in the new mailbox.

If it goes wrong

Outgoing mail lands in spam

This is almost always missing SPF and DKIM records. Both are DNS records that tell the receiving server your mail is legitimate. Open a ticket and we will add them; without them, a brand-new domain is treated with suspicion by every major provider.

The email client cannot connect

Check the port and encryption first: IMAP on 993 with SSL, SMTP on 465 with SSL. Many ISPs block outbound port 25 entirely, so if your client defaults to it, mail will silently fail to send.

The mailbox is full

Raise the quota in cPanel, or clear the Trash and Junk folders, which count toward it. IMAP keeps everything on the server by design, so a mailbox that has never been pruned fills up eventually.

Set up aliases rather than extra mailboxes wherever you can. An alias like billing@yourdomain.com that forwards into your main inbox costs nothing, needs no separate password, and means one less mailbox to secure.

Turn on two-factor authentication for the client portal, and use a distinct password for each mailbox. A compromised mailbox is not just an inconvenience — it gets your domain onto spam blocklists, and getting off them takes considerably longer than getting on.