Email, MX records, and why your inbox needs storage
Professional email on your own domain — you@yourbusiness.com instead of a free webmail address — runs on the same few DNS records for everyone. What's less obvious is that behind those records sits something entirely physical: a mailbox is a real, finite amount of disk space, and that fact shapes more of how email works than most people expect.
What actually happens when someone emails you
When a message is sent to you@yourbusiness.com, the sending server looks up your domain's MX record to find out which mail server accepts mail for you, and delivers the message there. That server doesn't forward it anywhere by default — it stores it, in your mailbox, until something (your phone, your email client, webmail) comes and asks for it. Read receipts, "delivered" notifications, an inbox that's there again after you close your laptop and open your phone — all of that depends on the message having actually landed on storage somewhere in between.
Why storage is the part people forget about
An email with a couple of photos attached can easily be several megabytes; a few years of business correspondence, invoices and the occasional large file adds up faster than it feels like it should. Every one of those messages sits in your mailbox's storage until you delete it — which is exactly why a quota exists, and why it's worth understanding rather than ignoring.
The genuinely important consequence: a mailbox that fills up doesn't quietly become read-only. New mail sent to it usually bounces — the sender gets a rejection instead of you getting a delivery. For a business, that's not a storage inconvenience; it's a missed order, a missed reply to a client, a bounced invoice, discovered only when someone mentions "I emailed you last week and never heard back."
A practical habit: if a mailbox tends to fill up, it's almost always attachments, not text. Downloading and removing a handful of large files from a mailbox usually buys back far more room than deleting dozens of ordinary messages.
Getting mail to arrive at all: SPF, DKIM and DMARC
Storage only matters once mail is actually reaching you — and reaching an inbox rather than a spam folder is its own small battle, fought almost entirely with the TXT records we cover in our DNS records guide. In short: SPF lists which servers are allowed to send as your domain, DKIM signs outgoing mail so it can be verified as unaltered, and DMARC tells a receiving server what to do if a message fails those checks. Skip them, and even genuine mail from your own domain can land in spam — or get rejected outright by mail providers that have grown stricter about unauthenticated senders over the years.
A few practical decisions worth making upfront
- How many addresses you actually need. A single
info@for a small business is often enough to start; separate addresses per person or department make more sense once a team is big enough that shared inboxes get confusing. - How much storage per mailbox. More than you think you'll need is cheap insurance against the "I can't send, my mailbox is full" message arriving at the worst possible time.
- Webmail access. Even with mail set up on a phone and a laptop, having a browser-based fallback matters the one time neither is at hand.
Our email hosting handles the DNS side of all of this automatically when it's set up on a domain you manage with us — the records, the authentication, and a plan sized for how much a mailbox actually needs to hold.