Overview
This article describes adding an email address to your account using the DreamHost web panel.
Prerequisites
You must have an active hosting plan, or a paid email add-on plan to use email.
All hosting plans except Shared Starter offer email at no cost.
While Shared Starter hosting plans and domain registration-only accounts do not include email, you can add a paid email plan onto your account that includes up to 5 email addresses. View the following article for more information:
Adding a new email address
Fully hosted email
In the past, it was possible to create a fully hosted email that also forwarded to another inbox. This feature is no longer supported and any new email addresses created will not have this option. Existing email addresses using this feature will remain unaffected until they are edited, at which time you will need to select between forward only or fully hosted.
A fully hosted email address is an address that has an active mailbox that you can log into in order to send and receive messages. Fully-hosted email users can access their own mailbox and use the Webmail and the Mailboxes you do not wish to access through the Webmail interface.
Description of fields in the fully hosted email page
Email settings
- Email Address
- To the left of the “@” symbol, enter your desired alias. To the right of the “@” symbol, select the domain or subdomain under which the user will be created.
- Malibox Login
- Like it says, "just use the full email address!"
- Mailbox "Name"
- The name that will appear on the panel's Manage Email page for this mailbox.
- Pick a new password for me / Password
- Check the box if you want the system to generate a password for you. If you do not want the system to pick the password, you can set your own personalized password here.
The custom password must be 8 characters long and cannot contain the username of the user it’s being set for. For example, the user@example.com email user cannot have ‘user’ in the password as it will post the following error when attempting to set the password:
“Bad Password: password contains username”
- Change Password? / New Password Again
- This field appears if you elect to set your own password. Re-enter the custom password that you entered in the ‘Password’ field to verify that you have it's correct.
- Limit total disk usage
- See also: Disk Usage Warning
- You can set the size of your user’s mailbox. The field is populated with the default size of 200MB. You can edit the mailbox size by entering a different numeric value.
If you uncheck the box for 'MB', it will set the user’s mailbox size to unlimited. Unlimited mailboxes will show on the Manage Email page for the user as '10 MB / N/A MB (N/A%)' under the Mailbox column.
- Email me daily warnings
- When you enable this option, DreamHost will email a notice to the email address that indicates when the total disk space for the mailbox is within 10% of the remaining capacity (showing 90% on the Manage Email page for the user) or if it’s within 100MB of space left for that user. Simply check the box for this option to enable it. (This is an optional feature, so you can choose not to enable it if you wish.)
Saving your changes
Once you’ve entered all of the details for a fully-hosted email user, you can simply click the Create Address button at the bottom of the page to save the new information.
If the user was set up properly, you should see the following message at the top of the Manage Email page. If you chose to have the panel create a password for you, it displays in the message:
If this is the first email user created for the domain, the MX record and the other mail records are set for the domain once the user has been created. This requires up to 6 hours for the DNS to resolve for each mail record. Because of this, the user will not be accessible until the DNS has updated.
Adding a new email address to a custom DNS subdomain
The following describes how to add an email address to a subdomain with custom DNS records pointing outside of DreamHost.
- Navigate to the Manage Websites page.
- Open the DNS Settings page:
- If in Grid view, click the 'vertical 3 dots' button under your domain. From the popout menu, click the DNS Settings link.
- If in List view, click the 'vertical 3 dots' button to the right of your domain. From the popout menu, click the DNS Settings link.
- The domain's DNS records display.
- Copy any previously-added custom DNS subdomain records to a local document. In the example above, blog is the custom subdomain A record previously added.
- Click the pencil
icon to the right of the record. This opens the record for you to edit.
- Click the Delete Record button beneath the record fields.
- Click the Remove button to confirm.
- Navigate to the Hosted Domains page.
- Click the Add Hosting to a Domain/Sub-domain button on the top right.
- Under the Fully Hosted section, enter your subdomain name in the Domain to host: field. You can leave the remaining fields as they are.
- Click on Fully host this domain.
- You will be redirected to the Hosted Domains page.
- Click on Remove under the WEB HOSTING column next to the subdomain you just added.
- A popup will appear. You can click OK to confirm.
- Click on DNS underneath the subdomain you just added.
- On the top right corner, click on Add Record.
- Select the type of DNS record you will add.
- In the example above, the A record for blog.example.com is being added.
- Click the Add Record button to save changes.
You can now add an email address for your subdomain following the steps from the beginning of this article.
Changing an existing email to fully hosted
Deleting an email address
To delete an email address in the panel:
- Navigate to the Manage Email page.
- Click the Delete button to the right of your email address.
- When prompted, select 'Ok' to confirm the deletion request.
How long does it take a new email address to function?
By default, your domain is not set up with MX (mail hosting) records with DreamHost when the domain is set to be hosted. The MX records and all other mail hosting records are applied to the domain once the first email address is created.
After you’ve created your email address (and if this is the first email address created under the domain), the domain will need some time for the mail record DNS to propagate, which can take up to 6 hours for each record.
If your domain is already configured with the records for mail hosting, the newly created user should be fully active within 15 minutes of it being created.
Sending and receiving email using your new email address
The following records are configured when the first user is created:
-
- _domainkey (dkim)
- _autodiscover (srv)
- mail. (A)
- mail. (MX)
- mail. (MX)
- mailboxes. (A)
- www.mailboxes. (A)
- webmail. (A)
- www.webmail. (A)
There are two MX records for the domain’s mail hosting along with the records for the subdomains for Mailboxes and Webmail. Each record can resolve at different times, so one service may be active while another has yet to update.
During this time, messages sent to your user will be rejected with a bounce notification containing the following error:
-
Recipient Address Rejected
Until the DNS resolves, the messages sent to your user will continue to be rejected. However, your user should be able to send messages even when the DNS has yet to resolve. This often causes confusion as to why a user can send, but cannot receive emails. Give the DNS a bit more time to resolve before the new user can receive incoming mail.
To send and receive emails, DreamHost offers the Webmail interface by default. This can be accessed once the DNS resolves for the webmail record. You can access the Webmail interface with the following URL: https://webmail.dreamhost.com.
Internet standards email addresses
Internet standards specify that you create the following specific email addresses, which every domain should have and use for the following purposes:
| Address | Purpose |
|---|---|
| postmaster@example.com | contact for any email issues, should exist for any domain that has email service |
| webmaster@example.com | contact for any website issues, should exist for any domain that has a website or http service |
| hostmaster@example.com | contact for any DNS issues, should exist for all domains since they all use DNS for everything |
| abuse@example.com | contact for any "inappropriate public behavior" |
