System Mailbox
Some mail goes to your account rather than to a person: the output of
your scheduled jobs, and the postmaster@ and abuse@ addresses every
domain must answer.
The System Mailbox is where all of it collects. Each account has exactly one, whether you open it or not.
Two things set it apart from an ordinary mailbox:
- It has no password. The only way in is from this control panel, so there's no separate credential to manage or lose.
- It isn't one of your domain accounts. It doesn't appear in the address list and belongs to no single domain. You reach it from Email & Identity → System Mailbox.
What it collects
| Source | Notes |
|---|---|
postmaster@ and abuse@ for every domain you host | The email standards require both on every domain, and some services depend on them, e.g. a certificate authority that verifies a domain by email, or a person reporting abuse. The mail for all your domains arrives here, with nothing to set up per domain. |
| The output of your scheduled jobs | Anything a scheduled job prints, unless you redirected or suppressed the output. A nightly job that fails leaves something here for you to read. |
postmaster and abuse are reservedThe panel answers them for you, so you can't create a domain account, a forwarder, or any other address with either name on your domains. Every other name is yours.
Read the mailbox
The Open system webmail button opens webmail in a new tab, already signed in; the panel authenticates you, so webmail asks for no password.
This is a separate session from your domain accounts' webmail, so opening one doesn't sign you out of the other.
There's no IMAP password for this mailbox and no app password. By design, you reach it through the panel or not at all.
Reply to a message
You can't send mail from the mailbox's own address. It exists to receive; mail claiming to come from it would fail authentication at the receiving end.
When you reply, webmail lets you send as postmaster@ or abuse@ on one
of your own domains. You choose the address while writing. That's the
right address for answering an abuse report or a certificate validation
message.
Retention
The mailbox holds machine-generated notices whose value drops quickly, and it shares your account's storage quota. Unlimited job output would take the space your real mail needs.
To keep a message, move it somewhere else or forward it with a filter rule before it's deleted.
Before you have a mail service
The mailbox collects mail as soon as your account exists. A scheduled job on an account that hosts only websites still delivers its output here.
Webmail is served from a mail service's hostname, so until you add a Mail service to one of your domains there's nowhere to read the mail. The page says so, and the button appears once a mail service exists.