Email Alias

An email alias is an additional email address that has no mailbox of its own but forwards incoming messages to another, existing destination address. This lets you receive mail sent to many addresses in one place, without creating and maintaining separate mail accounts.

How an email alias works

An alias works as a forwarding rule defined on the mail server. When a message arrives at the alias address (for example contact@yourcompany.com), the server immediately passes it to the designated main mailbox (for example john@yourcompany.com). The alias itself uses no disk space and needs no separate login — it is simply a label pointing to where mail should go. One destination address can serve many aliases, and some setups let a single alias fan out to several mailboxes at once.

Aliases are configured in the mail hosting panel. To also send messages from the alias address, you additionally configure your mail client and ensure correct sender-authentication records such as SPF and DKIM, which protects mail from landing in spam.

Email aliases in practice

Aliases are a convenient way to organize communication in a company. You can create functional addresses such as contact@, office@, sales@, or billing@ and route them to specific people or teams. During staff changes, you simply change the forwarding target without telling clients about a new address. Aliases also help with segmenting mail — a separate address for newsletters or sign-ups makes messages easier to filter. Within hosting mail services, creating aliases is usually free and unlimited, and they are handled by the server named in the domain's MX record. Remember that an alias is not a backup — because it stores no messages, archiving is the responsibility of the destination mailbox.