How to setup POP and IMAP email accounts

 In this article, you'll learn how to set up email accounts for users that log into the Admin Console and manage the site.

Before setting up email addresses, you must first complete these steps:

•   upgrade your trial site. 
•   set up the site's domain name. 
•   create email accounts for users. 

 When you set up email accounts in this system, the email addresses will follow this format: 

username@my_domain_name.com

In the example above, replace username with any term (such as a team member's name, the word info, contact or any other name you'd like). Replace my_domain_name with the name of the site's domain name. 

Benefits of using the integrated email service

•         Based on the website’s hosting plan, you can create multiple email enabled users;
•         You can use IMAP protocol to connect to share the mailbox amongst multiple users;
•         There's an unlimited number of aliases that you can assign per mailbox.
•         Each account includes 5Gb of mailbox space.

Set up the site’s domain name 

Before you can create email accounts, the domain name for the site must first be set. In order to have email inboxes hosted with Business Catalyst you must use this service in order to perform domain redelegation. Note: If you are using an external DNS service to resolve your domain name you will not be able to host email accounts with the Business Catalyst service.

To perform domain redelegation and enable the e-mail service for your domain use these steps:

•Under Site Settings access Site Domains. 

Please note that this feature is available only for upgraded sites, you will not be able to enter a domain for a trial site.

•Click on New Domain and fill out the Domain field with your own domain name.

•Select the following options:

For more information on how to configure domain names for a site, see Setting up your site's domain name using DNS tools. 

Creating email accounts for users

To set up an email account for a user, it’s necessary to create the user account in the following format:

username@my_domain_name.com

The domain of the user account needs to match the domain you have configured in the previous step for your website. To create user accounts go to Site settings – Site users:

In the upper menu click on the New User button and create the username with the following settings – make sure the Enable Email checkbox is checked:

Creating Email Only users 

For setting this up simply leave the checkbox Allow Admin Access unchecked when creating an email enabled user only.

Creating email aliases

You can add an unlimited number of email aliases for a single email account. For example, julie@exampledomain.com can also receive messages sent to the following email addressed created for this account in the form of aliases: info@my_domain_name.com, sales@ my_domain_name.com and contact@my_domain_name.com.

Note: If you are entering multiple email aliases, use a semicolon (;) to separate them in the field, as shown above.

Creating email accounts for multiple domains

After creating a default domain you can add several different domains to your website. E-mail accounts can only be created using the format username@default_email_domain.com. How do we create e-mail enabled users for the other domains hosted with the website?

Answer: You don’t need to. These are already created in the backend for the secondary domains. Let’s take the following example:

If we were to create the username Julie@exampledomain1.com on the website and enable email for her account in the backend the system will automatically create the email address Julie@exampledomain2.com.

Please note that the system will only allow you to add email enabled users to the system with the default domain for e-mail. 

If you are not sure what the default domain for email is have a look at the following section:

Managing MX records for multiple domains 

In Site Settings – Site Domains – expand MX Records(Mail) and you will have a list of the currently email enabled domains for your website.

How to change the default domain for email

In order to change the default domain used to create email accounts you will need to:

• delete all MX records hosted on the site, 
• recreate them and assign the default account to the domain that you want to have set as default.

   

Upon deleting the default MX associated with a domain all email inboxes associated with this domain are deleted. This is why it is recommended to follow the procedure below when performing the switch:

• Backup all the emails currently hosted under the existing email accounts;
• Delete all MX records located under Site Settings – Site Domains – MX Records(Mail);
• Create new MX records for the email enabled domains you wish to host on your website;
• Set a new default email domain;
• Recreate the email enabled users.

How to create an external MX record

If you wish to have your domain hosted with Business Catalyst but use an external email server to handle the email service follow these steps:

In Site Domain – select More Actions – New MX Record – and set it up with the Use external service for email option 

Using these steps you can also add the Google Apps mail service to your Business Catalyst account.

How to access an email account

In order to access an e-mail account created with Business Catalyst you have two options:

Using the webmail interface – for more information use this KB article: Using webmail to access and manage email messages.

Using an email client – detailed instructions for different email clients are listed here.

If you are encountering difficulties when attempting to receive or send email messages, see Troubleshooting issues sending and receiving email.