Under the bonnet

Email infrastructure & deliverability

Where your mail lives, how it authenticates, how you can see what happened to any message — and the limits we would rather tell you about ourselves.

The platform

What actually runs your mail

UKBox email runs on the industry-standard cPanel stack — Dovecot for IMAP and POP, Exim for SMTP — on hardware we own in UK data centres in London, Coventry and Maidenhead, on UK IP space. Your mailbox content stays in the UK. Email plans are provisioned as mail-only accounts: there is no web stack attached to your mail account to compete with it or widen its attack surface.

What you're askingThe honest answer
AuthenticationSPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured automatically on every domain. DMARC starts in monitoring mode and is tightened to reject on request, so your domain is hard to spoof without breaking your own senders first.
Sending reputationOutbound mail is authenticated and rate-limited to protect the sending IPs. Before you migrate anything, ask us for the mail-server hostname, reverse DNS and sending IP range and check the reputation yourself — we would rather you verified than took our word.
Delivery diagnosticsEvery account includes per-message delivery tracing in the control panel: see whether any message you sent or expected was accepted, deferred or delivered, and why. You do not need to raise a ticket to find out what happened to an email.
Spam & virus filteringImunify360 plus server-level spam and virus filtering on every mailbox.
BackupsDaily, kept for a rolling 5 days and copied off-site to a second UK data centre, so your mail and its backup are never in the same place. We can restore an individual mailbox or message on request.
ConnectionsTLS on every connection — webmail, IMAP, POP and SMTP.
Included on every plan

Platform features

Unlimited aliases & forwarders

info@, sales@ and accounts@ can all land in one mailbox. You pay for people who need a login, not for addresses.

Catch-all addresses

Collect mail sent to any address at your domain — misspellings included — into a mailbox you choose.

Automatic out-of-office replies

Auto-responders per mailbox, set from the control panel or webmail.

Shared calendars & contacts

Sync to Outlook, Apple Mail and Calendar, iPhone and Android over CalDAV and CardDAV.

Per-mailbox quotas you control

Storage pools across your account by default; ring-fence any mailbox with its own limit in the control panel if you prefer.

Open standards, no lock-in

Standard IMAP and POP on your own domain. The same openness that makes moving in free and zero-loss makes leaving easy too.

Being straight with you

The limits, stated plainly

99.9% is a target, not a credit-backed SLA

It is a genuine target with a track record and a live status page, but the standard plans do not carry contractual service credits. If your business needs a signed SLA, ask us and we will discuss it rather than pretend.

Support is human, UK-based — and not a guaranteed 24/7 desk

The team typically replies in about ten minutes during staffed hours, and staff are generally around from roughly 5am to midnight, 365 days a year. Migrations are done out-of-hours so nobody loses a working day. We would rather state that plainly than let you assume a round-the-clock desk.

If you need Teams, SharePoint or the Office apps

Buy Microsoft 365 — that is the honest advice and we publish it on our own comparison page. UKBox email is for teams that need professional email, calendars and contacts on their own domain.

No mailing-list manager

The plans do not include a bulk mailing-list tool, and business mailboxes are the wrong place for bulk sending anyway — use a dedicated newsletter service and keep your domain's reputation clean.

Questions

Deliverability questions, answered

Will my email reach Gmail and Outlook inboxes?

Authentication is what inbox providers check first, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured on every UKBox domain from day one. No provider can honestly promise the inbox every time — content and sending behaviour matter too — which is why we give you per-message delivery tracing and will hand over our sending hostname and IP range so you can test before you migrate.

Can I see logs for my own email?

Yes. Per-message delivery tracing is included in the control panel on every plan: it shows whether a message was accepted, deferred or delivered, and why. For anything deeper, support can check the server-side logs for you.

Is UKBox email on shared or dedicated infrastructure?

On hardware UKBox owns outright in UK data centres, on UK IP space, running mail-only accounts. It is a shared platform — that is what makes flat per-business pricing possible — with outbound rate-limiting and filtering protecting the sending reputation all customers share.

What happens if something does go to spam?

Trace the message in your control panel to see if it delivered, then raise a ticket — a human typically replies in about ten minutes during staffed hours. Because DMARC runs on your domain, spoofed mail pretending to be you gets stopped rather than landing in your customers' spam folders and burning your name.

Check us before you commit

Ask for the sending hostname and IP range, test us against your current provider, then let us migrate you for free with nothing lost.

See email hosting plans