Free Email Hosting: The Ten-Domain Plan and Where It Stops

We mention free email hosting a lot. Ten domains, ten mailboxes on each, no card — it turns up across this blog as a line in a comparison table or a footnote in a pricing argument. What almost none of those mentions do is finish the sentence, because there's a limit attached that changes who the plan is for, and reading about it after you've moved a domain across is the wrong order.

So this page is the whole shape of it. What the free plan holds, the one thing it won't do, the supported way around that, and the point where you should stop using it and pay us $4 a month instead.

What Free Email Hosting Means Here, and What It Usually Means Elsewhere

Most offers with this label give you one mailbox on the provider's own domain. Your address ends in their brand, the account is a lead magnet, and the arrangement stops there. That is the common meaning of free email hosting and it isn't what we're describing.

Our free plan — Nano — holds ten domains that you own, with up to ten mailboxes on each of them, and it speaks IMAP, POP, CalDAV and CardDAV from the first day. You can point Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird or a phone at it and it behaves like any other mail account, because underneath it is the same Dovecot and Postfix that the paid plans run on.

If what you actually want is the general argument about whether free is ever a good idea for a business, we've written that separately in what free business email really costs, and it reaches a harder conclusion than this page does. The two are meant to be read together: that one is about the category, this one is about the specific plan and its edges.

The Ten-Domain Shape of Our Free Email Hosting

The numbers, since they're the reason anyone opens a page like this:

The protocols line is worth pausing on, because it's where free email hosting normally gets thin. Plenty of free tiers keep IMAP for paying customers and hand everyone else a web page, which quietly means you can't keep your mail in the client you already use. Zoho's free tier is the best-known example — their pricing page lists it below the paid plans, without IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, and marked as available only in select data centers. That restriction doesn't exist here.

The catch-all is the other underrated entry. Switch it on and every address at a domain resolves whether or not anyone created it, so a name you registered two years ago stops silently dropping anything sent to info@ or hello@. We go through the mechanics of that in how a domain catch-all works.

The Limit That Decides Everything: It Receives, It Doesn't Send

Here is the part the passing mentions leave out. The free plan cannot send through our SMTP servers. Mail arrives, is stored, syncs down to your client and sits there quite happily, but press reply and it will not leave the building.

That's deliberate rather than an omission someone forgot to fix. Free outbound capacity is exactly what bulk senders go shopping for, and a provider that hands it out is spending the sending reputation that its paying customers rely on. Every free tier in this market makes some version of that trade, whether by throttling, by delaying, or by requiring a phone number. Ours makes it by not offering outbound at all, and says so here rather than in a support reply three weeks later.

Which gives free email hosting from us a precise job description: it is a receiving system. If the thing you need is a mailbox you can write from, and you have no relay of your own, then this plan is not it and the $4 tier is.

Free Email Hosting That Does Send, Using Your Own SMTP

There is one exception, and it isn't a loophole someone forgot to close — it's a supported setting that happens not to be restricted by plan.

Any domain can be pointed at your own SMTP profile: your relay, your credentials, your reputation. The plan check in our code applies only to managed platform SMTP, so if you supply the sending path yourself, the free plan uses it, because at that point the deliverability risk is yours rather than ours.

In practice that means free email hosting plus an SMTP account you already pay for — one bundled with a transactional provider, or a server you run — is a complete, working mailbox at no cost to you from us. You aren't being given free sending. You're bringing sending you already own, and we're not charging you to attach it. Each domain can carry a different profile, so a portfolio can route outbound several different ways from a single account.

The Storage Arithmetic Nobody Does

Five gigabytes sounds generous until you notice the word pooled. It is not five per mailbox — it's five across every mailbox on all ten domains, so a hundred mailboxes sharing it comes out around fifty megabytes each, which one enthusiastic PDF thread will eat.

For parked domains and low-traffic addresses that ceiling is close to irrelevant, and years can pass without approaching it. For anything resembling a working inbox with attachments, it is the limit you will hit first, well before the domain or mailbox counts matter. Worth knowing which constraint actually binds you before you plan around the wrong one.

The Complete List of What Free Email Hosting Gives Up

A page that lists only the inclusions isn't much use to someone deciding, so here is everything the free plan doesn't do:

• No aliases. They begin on the paid plans at thirty per mailbox.
• No forwarding of any kind. Not to an outside address, and no mailbox-less forwarding addresses either — those are an Agency feature. Catch-all delivering into a mailbox on the same domain is the entire routing story here.
• No mail filters and no auto-reply. Server-side rules start on Pro.
• No external accounts, so you can't pull a Gmail or Microsoft mailbox into the same window.
• No shared mailboxes.
• Documentation rather than tickets. Support by ticket starts with the paid plans.

That's a real list and it's meant to read like one. If three of those items matter to you, then free email hosting is the wrong shelf and the paid tier is where you should be looking.

Parked Domains: The Job This Was Built For

The strongest case for this plan is the least glamorous one. Most people who own domains own more than they use — a project that never launched, a rebrand that left the old name behind, defensive registrations covering the common typos of the main domain. Right now mail sent to those either bounces or disappears into nothing, and nobody finds out what was missed.

Ten of them can be catching mail by this evening at no cost, with catch-all on and the whole lot readable over IMAP in the client that's already open on your desk. Nothing needs to be replied to from those addresses; if something arrives that deserves an answer, you answer it from your real mailbox. That is free email hosting doing precisely the job it's shaped for, and it's a job most providers won't do at any price without charging per domain.

The same logic covers a domain you're evaluating before committing, and it covers testing us honestly: not a two-week countdown, but a real domain with real mail flowing through real IMAP for as long as you want, with migration included so you can bring an existing mailbox in and watch how it behaves before any card appears.

How This Free Email Hosting Compares With the Names You Know

Both of the free tiers people weigh this against are more generous than us on exactly the thing we withhold, and it's worth saying so plainly rather than pretending otherwise. Zoho and Proton will both let you send. Where they close up is the client: Zoho's free tier has no IMAP at all, and Proton keeps mail client support over IMAP and SMTP for Plus and above, so on their free plan you use their apps or you run their Bridge.

The trade runs in opposite directions, then. They hand you sending and take your mail client; this free email hosting hands you the protocols and ten of your own domains, and takes your sending. Which of those is the better bargain depends entirely on what you're doing, and anyone claiming a universal answer is selling you something. The longer versions are in our Zoho Mail comparison, which goes through the region-locking in detail.

When to Stop Using Free Email Hosting

Three signals, and any one of them is enough.

You keep needing to reply. If you're routinely copying text into another mailbox to answer from there, the free plan has stopped saving you money and started costing you minutes. That's the $4 plan's entire purpose.

More than one person is involved. There are no shared mailboxes, no filters and no aliases, and five gigabytes between a team disappears quickly. It will not hold, and discovering that during a busy week is unpleasant.

You want the mail sorted before you see it. Filters begin on Pro, not Starter, which catches people out — the jump you need for automatic sorting is two steps up rather than one, and it's better to know that now than after paying for the wrong tier.

Upgrading changes limits on the account you already have. Domains, mailboxes and stored mail stay exactly where they are, and outbound simply switches on, so nothing about starting here makes it harder to move up later. That's the point of the plan: not a trap and not a countdown, but a genuinely useful shape with one clearly marked edge.