Backbuild Mail: Email at Your Own Domain

Backbuild Mail is the email client and mailbox service built into the Backbuild workspace. You receive and send mail at your own domain, sort it with folders and labels, search the full text of every message, and read it live across every device you sign in from. This page teaches what Backbuild Mail does today, how your mail is stored and protected, and, so you can choose with clear eyes, what it does not do.

Email at Your Own Domain, on Every Plan

Email at your own domain is included on every Backbuild plan, including Free. You link a domain you own, and Backbuild Mail walks you through the DNS records that let you receive and send as you@your-domain. There is no separate mailbox subscription and no add-on: a mailbox at your domain is part of the workspace the same way Calendar, Docs, and Sheets are. The Free plan includes up to 500 outbound emails a month and two linked domains, a primary domain and a separate one for marketing and newsletters. Paid plans lift the linked-domain limit and raise outbound volume. Current allowances are listed on the pricing page.

Receiving and Sending

Inbound mail is delivered through Cloudflare Email Routing, or, for a domain you would rather run yourself, through a self-hosted mail server that Backbuild operates for your domain. Either way, a message addressed to your linked domain is parsed, filed into the right mailbox, run through your filters, and appears in your inbox in real time. Outbound mail is sent through a managed sending service and signed with DKIM for your verified domain, so it authenticates cleanly at the receiving end. When your organization is on the free email plan, a short provenance line is appended to the messages you send.

  • Real inbound mail: you receive messages sent to your domain, not just send from it.
  • Authenticated sending: outbound mail is DKIM-signed for your verified domain, and the setup wizard provisions SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for you.
  • Aliases and catch-all: you can add alias addresses on a verified domain and route unmatched addresses to a catch-all mailbox.
  • Send protections: per-organization daily send caps and recipient gates keep the domain reputation clean, so Backbuild Mail is a real mailbox, not a bulk-mail blaster.

The Guided Domain Setup

Linking a domain is the step people dread with self-run email, so Backbuild Mail turns it into a wizard. You enter the domain, and the setup screen shows you the exact DNS records to add, checks them for you, and confirms when receiving and sending are both verified. It provisions and verifies the records that make mail deliverable: the MX records that route inbound mail, and the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records that let your outbound mail pass authentication. You do not need to understand each record to get a working mailbox at your domain.

Sorting: Folders, Labels, and Filters

Backbuild Mail sorts mail the way a heavy email user expects. You get the standard system folders, Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash, Archive, Starred, and Important, plus your own labels. A message can carry several labels at once, and you assign them by drag or keyboard. Filters are rules you define once, a set of conditions and the actions to take, that run automatically on new mail and can be re-run on demand across the mailbox.

  • System folders and custom labels: file mail into folders, or tag it with as many labels as you like.
  • Server-evaluated filters: conditions map to actions such as label, move, star, or mark read, applied on arrival.
  • Spam and phishing handling: report spam or phishing, and see the SPF, DKIM, and DMARC verdicts recorded on each message.

Search That Reads the Whole Message

Backbuild Mail search covers the full text of your mail, the sender, the recipients, the subject, and the message body, and it accepts structured operators such as from:, label:, is:unread, is:starred, and has:attachment. Because the mailbox index lives on the server, a search returns matches from inside the body of old messages, not just recent headers. Full-text body search is one of the places Backbuild Mail is genuinely strong: it is fast and complete because the server holds a searchable index of your mail.

A Live, Multi-Device Client

An open mailbox is a single live object shared by every device you connect from. New mail, reads, stars, label changes, and deletes propagate in real time to every open client, so your phone and your laptop never disagree about what you have read. The layout matches what people expect from a modern mail client: a left rail of folders and labels, a message list, and a reading pane you can place below the list or to its right, or turn off. Keyboard shortcuts are there for the people who live in their inbox.

Composing Mail

The composer is a rich HTML editor with attachments, and it carries the conveniences that make daily email bearable.

  • Undo send: a cancellation window of up to thirty seconds after you hit send.
  • Scheduled send and snooze: send later, and snooze a message to return to your inbox at a chosen time.
  • Draft autosave: your draft is saved continuously as you write, so a closed tab does not lose it.
  • Attachments: attach files up to 25 MB per part, stored and de-duplicated per mailbox.
  • Signatures: set a custom signature for your mailbox.

How Your Mail Is Stored and Protected

Every message you receive or send is written as an immutable file to durable storage before it is acknowledged, and the mailbox index is derived from those files, so your mail survives even if the live index is rebuilt. Mail is encrypted in transit over TLS and encrypted at rest in storage. Every read and write, opening a mailbox, fetching a message, fetching an attachment, sending, changing a label, editing a filter, is authorized against your identity and your organization's roles, and mailbox actions are recorded in an append-only audit trail. Inbound HTML is sanitized and sandboxed before it is shown, and remote images are proxied, so a message cannot run code or quietly phone home when you open it.

Being precise matters here, because email security is a field where overstating protection does real harm. Backbuild Mail is not end-to-end encrypted, and it is not zero-access: the service holds the keys, and the server can read message bodies, which is what makes server-side full-text search, spam filtering, and HTML sanitization possible. If your requirement is that the provider be technically unable to read your mail, Backbuild Mail is not built for that model, and you should choose a zero-access provider. Backbuild does include a separate zero-knowledge, post-quantum password and secrets manager in the same workspace, documented under Security and RBAC, but that zero-knowledge property applies to the vault, not to mailbox contents.

Access Through the Backbuild Client

You read and send Backbuild Mail through the Backbuild web app and the Backbuild desktop app for Windows and macOS. Backbuild Mail does not expose IMAP, POP, or SMTP endpoints, so you do not connect a third-party mail program such as Apple Mail or Thunderbird to it. If connecting an external mail client over IMAP is a requirement for you, that is a real limitation to weigh.

Where Backbuild Mail Fits

Backbuild Mail is the right choice when you want professional email at your own domain, set up without wrestling DNS, that lives in the same workspace as your calendar, contacts, documents, sheets, and files, with real-time sync, strong full-text search, and role-based access and audit logging on every plan, including Free. It is not the right choice when your defining requirement is that the provider be cryptographically unable to read your mail, or when you must connect an external IMAP client. Choosing well means matching the tool to the requirement, and this page is written so you can.

Learn Backbuild Mail Task by Task

This page is the overview. The Backbuild Mail documentation teaches each job end to end: