On our web hosting control panel you can find the expression “email alias”. Many first-time web hosting users have no idea what it is and if you are one of them, read along – in this article I explain what an email alias is and what it is used for.

An email alias is an alternative address of a mailbox. Each mailbox is an actual folder on the server where files and folders that belong to this mailbox are stored. For a message to be received in this mailbox, it must be send to one the aliases of this mailbox. There could be more than one aliases associates with this mailbox. Whenever someone sends an email to any of them, the message is received in the same mailbox.

Let’s take an example mailbox email@my-best-domain.com. By default the address, which people would use to send an email to this mailbox is email@my-best-domain.com. If you however create an alias for email@my-best-domain.com, which is named alias@my-best-domain.com people would be able to send you emails both to email@my-best-domain.com and alias@my-best-domain.com and still reach the same mailbox.

Creating aliases is useful when you want to be able to provide different people with different email addresses to contact you but you still want all emails to be received in the same mailbox.

Email aliases are also used when you setup a redirection, not only when you create a mailbox or create an alias for an existing mailbox. If we go back to the afore-mentioned example, the count of aliases used would be 2 – the default one – email@my-best-domain.com and also alias@my-best-domain.com. If you setup a redirection so that email@my-best-domain.com is redirected to another email address, the count of aliases used would be 3, because the redirection uses one as well.