New to business email? A plain-English overview of how domains, mailboxes, and aliases fit together on MailAfiniti, so the rest of setup makes sense.

If you have never run email on your own domain before, the setup screens can throw a lot of new words at you: domain, DNS, MX record, mailbox, alias. None of it is complicated once you see how the pieces fit. This guide is the five-minute read that makes everything else click. No setup required, just understanding.

By the end you'll know:

What a domain actually does for your email
The difference between a mailbox and an alias
What DNS records are and why MailAfiniti asks you to add them
How a message travels from a sender to your inbox

Your domain is your address, not your inbox

Your domain is the part after the @ in your email address. If your address is hello@acme.com, then acme.com is your domain.

Owning a domain is like owning a street address. It tells the world where to deliver your mail, but the address by itself is not the mailbox. You still need an actual inbox behind it, and you need to tell the postal service which building to deliver to. On the internet, MailAfiniti is the building, and DNS records are how you point the mail there.

This is why buying a domain from a registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and so on) does not give you working email on its own. The registrar sells you the address. MailAfiniti gives you the inboxes and does the delivery.

DNS records are the signpost

DNS is the internet's address book. When someone sends email to hello@acme.com, their mail server asks DNS a simple question: "Where do I deliver mail for acme.com?" The answer comes from a handful of records you add once:

MX points incoming mail to MailAfiniti's servers. This is the core "deliver here" instruction.
SPF tells the world which servers are allowed to send mail as your domain. It stops other people from forging your address.
DKIM adds a cryptographic signature so receiving servers can confirm a message really came from you and was not tampered with.
DMARC ties SPF and DKIM together and tells receiving servers what to do if a message fails those checks.

You do not need to understand the cryptography. You just need these four records live so that (a) your mail arrives and (b) it lands in the inbox instead of the spam folder. MailAfiniti generates all four for you and shows them on the Domains page. Your only job is to copy them into your DNS provider once.

A mailbox is a real inbox. An alias is a forward.

This is the distinction that trips up the most people, so it is worth getting right early.

A mailbox is a genuine inbox with its own password and its own storage. You can log into it, it holds your mail, and you can connect it to Outlook, Apple Mail, or your phone. info@acme.com as a mailbox is a place mail actually lives.

An alias is just a forwarding rule. It has no inbox and no password of its own. Mail sent to the alias is passed straight through to a mailbox you already have. sales@acme.com as an alias pointing to info@acme.com means anything sent to sales quietly lands in the info inbox.

Rule of thumb: if a person needs to log in and read mail, they need a mailbox. If you just want another address that funnels into an existing inbox, use an alias. Aliases are free to create and do not count against your plan's mailbox count, so most people run a few real mailboxes and a handful of aliases on top. There is a dedicated guide on choosing between them if you want to go deeper.

How a message actually reaches you

Putting it together, here is the journey of a single email:

Someone types hello@acme.com and hits send.
Their mail server looks up your domain's MX record in DNS and sees it points to MailAfiniti.
The message is delivered to MailAfiniti's servers, which check SPF and DKIM to confirm it is legitimate.
MailAfiniti drops it into the mailbox for hello@acme.com (or, if that address is an alias, forwards it to the real mailbox behind it).
You see it in webmail, or in Outlook, Apple Mail, or your phone if you have connected a mail app.

Sending works the same way in reverse: your mail app hands the message to MailAfiniti's outgoing server, which signs it with DKIM and sends it on, and the recipient's server trusts it because your DNS records vouch for it.

What this means for setup

With the model in your head, the setup steps stop feeling arbitrary:

Add your domain so MailAfiniti knows which address you are running.
Copy the DNS records so mail is routed to MailAfiniti and trusted by other servers.
Create your mailboxes for the people who need real inboxes, and aliases for the extra addresses.
Connect a mail app if you would rather use Outlook or your phone than webmail.

That is the whole system. Everything on the dashboard is one of these four pieces.

Next steps

Getting Started walks you through the full setup end to end.
Find your DNS provider helps you locate where your records go.
Mailbox or alias, which do I need? goes deeper on choosing between the two.

Still stuck? Email us at support@mailafiniti.io and a real person will help.