Mailboxes, Inbox, and Reading

A mailbox is where your mail lives, and the inbox is where you work. This guide teaches you to create and manage mailboxes, read mail in a real-time inbox that stays in sync across every device, arrange the client the way you like, move fast with the keyboard, and understand how your mail is stored and protected. After this page you will have your mailbox set up the way you work and know exactly who can see what.

Create and Manage Mailboxes

After this section you will be able to create a mailbox, see every mailbox you can work from, and remove one you no longer need. A mailbox is a single address, such as you@your-domain, with exactly one owner: a person in your organization, or one of your organization's virtual workers. You can create more than one, and each is scoped to your organization: no one outside it can see or act on your mail.

• Create a mailbox with the local part you want (the piece before the @) on a domain your organization has linked and proven it owns, either in the domain setup wizard or, if you are an organization owner or admin, under Settings, Email Domains, on the domain's Inboxes tab. Creating a mailbox sets up the standard folders and labels automatically. Recipients see the mailbox's address as its sender name; a display name can be set when you create a mailbox through the REST API.
• See your mailboxes. Your list shows every mailbox you own, the inbox of each virtual worker you own, and any mailbox delegated to you, so all the addresses you work from are in one place. When you can read more than one, the mailbox switcher in the Email toolbar moves you between them (see Work From Several Mailboxes).
• Delete a mailbox you own with the trash icon beside its address on the same Inboxes tab, or through the REST API. Deleting removes the mailbox and all of its stored mail at once, and the app does not ask you to confirm, so check the address before you select the icon. Only the owner can delete a mailbox, and a mailbox a virtual worker is using cannot be deleted.

To create a mailbox you first need a linked domain whose ownership is verified. Mailboxes cannot be created on a domain until its ownership proof has passed, so an address can never be set up on a domain your organization does not control. If you have not linked a domain yet, start with Sending Domains and DNS Verification.

The Real-Time Inbox

After this section you will understand why the inbox never needs a manual refresh and how it stays fast. An open mailbox is one live object shared by every device you connect from. When new mail arrives, or when you (or anyone else who can open the mailbox) read a message, star it, change a label, or move it, that change propagates in real time to every open client. Your devices never disagree about what you have read.

The inbox loads a window of your most recent messages first, then fills in older mail and hydrates message bodies and attachments as you scroll and open them. This keeps the client responsive on a large mailbox: you see your latest mail immediately rather than waiting for everything to load.

Backbuild also prepares your mail before you ask for it. After you sign in, your inbox is loaded in the background, so Backbuild Mail opens with your messages already on screen. While it is open, the messages near the top of each folder are fetched ahead of time, so they open at once, and switching to another folder shows its recent messages immediately while it refreshes.

Work From Several Mailboxes

After this section you will be able to move between every mailbox you can read, and know which one Backbuild Mail opens first. Many people work from more than one address: their own inbox, a team address such as support@, and the inbox of a virtual worker they run. Backbuild Mail keeps them apart and lets you switch in one step.

• Email opens on your own inbox. Your own inbox is the oldest mailbox you own yourself. Backbuild Mail opens it every time you open Email, however many newer mailboxes you add later. If you own no mailbox yourself, for example because you only run virtual workers' inboxes, it opens one of the mailboxes you can read, preferring one that does not belong to a virtual worker.
• The mailbox switcher. When you can read two or more mailboxes, the first control in the Email toolbar shows the address you are working in. Select it to open the list of your mailboxes and choose another. With a single mailbox the switcher does not appear.
• Three groups. The list puts My inbox (your own inbox) first, then Other inboxes (your other mailboxes, then any delegated to you, by address), then Virtual workers (each worker's inbox under the worker's name). A check mark shows the mailbox you are in, and a mailbox you can only read carries a Read only tag.
• Each mailbox starts fresh. Choosing a mailbox reloads the Email screen for it, so no selection or open message carries over from the one you left. Your choice holds while you stay on the Email screen; the next time you open Email it starts on your own inbox again.
• Keyboard. With the switcher focused, Enter, Space or the Down arrow opens the list. The Up and Down arrows move through it, Home and End jump to the first and last mailbox, Enter or Space chooses one, and Escape closes the list without changing mailbox. While the list is open, the single-key mail shortcuts are paused, so a key you press there can never archive or delete the message you have selected.

Virtual Worker Inboxes

After this section you will know who can read a virtual worker's mail and where to find it. A Backbuild Virtual Worker can have its own inbox, such as ava.chen@your-domain, so it can receive and answer email as part of its job. You create the inbox, or assign one of your own, when you hire the worker or later in its configuration.

• The worker owns its inbox, and you own the worker. A worker's inbox belongs to the worker, and whoever owns the worker holds the owner's rights on that inbox: reading it and sending from it. The inbox cannot be deleted while the worker uses it. The inbox appears in your switcher under Virtual workers, and the worker's own page shows it on its Email tab, which always stays on that one inbox.
• Sharing the worker is not sharing its mail. Giving a colleague access to a worker does not let them read the worker's inbox. Someone who can read the inbox as a delegate but cannot see the worker finds it in their switcher under Other inboxes, without the worker's name. See Shared Mailboxes and Delegation for who can read a mailbox today.
• Assigning moves ownership. When you assign one of your existing mailboxes to a worker, the mailbox moves to the worker, and you keep the owner's rights through the worker. When a worker stops using an inbox, the inbox comes back to the worker's owner. An address you sign in with can never be assigned to a worker, so a worker never receives your sign-in or account-recovery mail.
• Only verified domains. A worker's inbox, like any mailbox, can be created only on a domain whose ownership is verified. When you create one, domains that are not verified yet are listed but cannot be chosen, and a domain whose mail setup is still in progress is marked so you know mail will not arrive until it finishes.

How to give a worker an inbox, and the worker's Email tab, are covered in the Backbuild Virtual Workers guides.

Folders and Views

After this section you will know where every message lives. Every mailbox comes with the standard system folders, plus saved views for the mail you flag.

• Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive, Spam, and Trash: the folders you expect, set up for you when the mailbox is created.
• Starred and Important: saved views that gather everything you have starred or that is marked important, so you can jump to it without hunting.

System folders cannot be renamed or removed; your own labels are fully yours to manage, covered in Labels, Filters, and Search.

Arrange the Client Your Way

After this section you will have the reading layout that suits how you work. Backbuild Mail lays out like a modern mail client: a rail of folders and labels, a message list, and a reading pane. The reading-pane placement control in the toolbar puts the reading pane below the message list (the default), to the right of the list, or turns the split off so a message opens on its own. The choice is saved for you, per mailbox, and does not change what anyone else sees.

Move Fast with the Keyboard

After this section you will be able to triage without reaching for the mouse. Backbuild Mail is built for people who live in their inbox. j and k move through the message list, c composes, r replies, e archives, # moves to Trash, and / jumps to search. Tick several messages to archive them, move them to Trash, mark them read, or label them all at once from the selection bar.

The full shortcut list is in Labels, Filters, and Search, alongside search.

How Your Mail Is Stored and Protected

After this section you will be able to answer, precisely, who can see your mail and how it is kept safe. Being exact here matters, because overstating email protection does real harm.

• Durable source of truth: every message you receive is written as an immutable file to durable storage before it is accepted, and the copy of each message you send is stored the same way once it has gone out. The searchable index is derived from those files, so your mail survives even if the index is rebuilt.
• Encrypted in transit and at rest: mail is protected with TLS in transit and encrypted at rest in storage.
• Organization-scoped access: every open, read, send, label change, filter edit, and delete is authorized against your identity and your organization's roles. A caller cannot see or act on another organization's mailbox, and a mailbox you are not entitled to returns a uniform not-found, so its existence is never revealed.
• Audited: mailbox actions are recorded in an append-only audit trail attributed to the person who performed them.
• The sender you see is the one who wrote the message: a received message is listed, searched and filtered by the address in its From line, the address that sender authentication checks, never by the delivery address that mailing services use to collect bounces. A message whose From line is missing or ambiguous (several From lines, more than one address, or an address disguised by encoding) is shown with no sender, so a forged name cannot borrow a trusted address.
• Safe rendering: inbound HTML is sanitized before it is shown, so a message cannot run code or quietly phone home when you open it.
• Open tracking on mail you send: a message you send in Rich mode carries a small tracking image, and your Sent folder shows whether it was opened. Messages sent in Plain mode are not tracked. See Open Tracking.
• Private image loading: remote images in a message are rewritten to load through a signed, same-origin image proxy. The proxy fetches the image server-side and sends no cookies, credentials, or referrer, so a sender's tracking pixel never sees your IP address or your location, and repeated opens are served from the proxy's cache rather than a fresh request to the sender's server.

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 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. Backbuild does include a separate zero-knowledge password and secrets manager in the same workspace, documented under Security and Compliance, but that zero-knowledge property applies to the vault, not to mailbox contents.

Related Guides

• Sending Domains and DNS Verification: link a domain before you create a mailbox.
• Shared Mailboxes and Delegation: who can read a mailbox today, and how teams run a team address.
• Labels, Filters, and Search: the keyboard shortcuts, search, and your reading-pane setting.