Email hosting

Last updated: 9 March 2022

All our web hosting plans include POP/IMAP email accounts. However, you don’t have to use a single hosting account for both your website and email. It is perfectly fine – and often beneficial – to host your website and email separately.

POP/IMAP and Microsoft 365

We offer two types of email hosting:

• POP and IMAP email accounts are hosted on our servers. You can create email accounts for your domain via the cPanel control panel, and you can access your emails via web mail (in your browser) and/or by adding the email address to an email client such as Outlook, Mac Mail or an email app on your phone or tablet.
• Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s email platform. The main advantages over POP/IMAP hosting is that each email account is much larger (50GB) and that you can sync your calendar and contacts between different devices. Some of the Microsoft 365 plans also include access to Microsoft applications such as Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

What are POP and IMAP?

POP and IMAP are protocols for retrieving emails from a mail server. They work slightly differently:

• POP typically downloads emails from the mail server to your email client and then deletes the email from the server. Emails you sent are only stored in your email client (and not on the server).
• IMAP doesn’t automatically delete emails from the server. Instead, IMAP keeps the emails on the server and your email client in sync.

Most email clients have an option to use POP and keep emails on the server for a specific amount of time. So, you can make POP behave more or less like IMAP. However, if you use that option you might as well use IMAP, unless you have very specific requirements. As a rule of thumb, we recommend using IMAP if you access your emails on more than one device (for instance, a laptop and phone).

That said, one downside of IMAP is that your email account will keep growing in size. Because your hosting package has a limited amount of disk space you may need to archive old emails from time to time.

Separating website and email hosting

As said, it is often useful to host your website and email separately. For instance, you might have a fairly small website but very large email accounts. In that case a good solution might be to use Microsoft 365 for your email.

To host your email elsewhere you typically only need to change the MX records for your domain. If the DNS for your domain is managed by us then we can make that change for you. We can usually also migrate your emails to the new platform. Please contact us if you are thinking about moving your emails.

Spam filtering

All our email hosting packages come with an advanced spam filter. For our POP/IMAP plans we use an external spam filter and all Microsoft 365 plans use a build-in spam filter.

Free migration

We can usually migrate your emails if you are moving your email from a different provider. Please contact us if you need help migrating your email.