Email Aliases

To take part in the global exchange of email messages over the Internet, a user needs to have an email address set up (also known as a POP3 account) on a mail server. The main attributes of an email account include a mail server, login username and password.

With those details at hand each user is able to handle incoming and outgoing email via a webmail application or email client of his/her choice. To further expand the reach and functionality of their e-communication, users can set unlimited number of email aliases to each email account.

What is an email alias?

An email alias looks just like an email address, but actually represents an alternative name of the original name of a mailbox. It is a forwarding email address, allowing for an email to be addressed to one mailbox but to be redirected to another mailbox. In other words, if someone sends you an email to the address yourname@my-best-domain.net, which is actually an email alias of companyname@my-best-domain.net, the mail server set at my-ntc-domain.com will forward the incoming email message to the parent mailbox (companyname@my-best-domain.net).

Why use an email alias?

The good side of using email aliases pertaining to a certain email address is that you can set as many of them as you actually need. Most email service providers do not set limits on the number of email aliases created per email account, which gives users the possibility to create various alternative names for their original mailbox.

For instance, with the help of email aliases a sales email address of a company (e.g. sales@somecompany.com) can be assigned individually to all the members of the sales team (e.g. gene@somecompany.com, tim@somecompany.com). This way, each of them will be able to reply to incoming email messages from their personal address, while those messages are addressed to sales@somecompany.com.

While being of great help in setting up a network of fictive email addresses serving one major mailbox, the email aliases do not boast much functionalities apart from that. The main reason for that is that with the set-up of an email alias no resource- consuming mailbox is actually created. That's why, with email aliases set for a mailbox, you will be able to use both the aliases and the real email address to send emails to third party email addresses, but you will receive all replies at your real email address only. For that reason, to check for new messages at gene@somecompany.com or tim@somecompany.com, Gene and Tim will have to open the sales@somecompany.com mailbox.

How to create an email alias

Creating an e-mail alias is a simple few-click process when executed through a user-friendly email management interface. For instance, the newly upgraded Email Manager integrated into all NTC Hosting web hosting plans, comes with an intuitively integrated Email Aliases set-up functionality, along with many email services like SPAM Filters, Catch-all emails, Anti-virus Protection, Mailing Lists, etc.

To create an alias for your existing email address, you need to simply select the email address and click on the Set-up Forwarding icon. This will take you to a two-click process, where you will need to just add the name of the new email alias and hit the 'Add' button. That's it. No need to activate the 'Save a copy' option, which is only necessary when you wish to forward emails from one real mailbox to another.