Porkbun Email Setup: What $36 a Year Actually Buys

People do not buy one domain at Porkbun. That is rather the point of the place: prices are low, checkout is fast, and six months later you own eleven of them. Then one turns into something real and needs a working hello@, so you open the dashboard, start on Porkbun email setup, and find a single envelope icon hiding three different products with three different bills. One is free and cannot reply. One costs $36 a year, billed per address rather than per domain. One hands the domain to somebody else. Here is what each route does, the exact records it needs, and the Porkbun-specific traps that waste an afternoon. Limits and prices checked against Porkbun's own documentation on 1 September 2026.

The three routes for Porkbun email setup

All three live behind the same envelope icon in the EMAIL column of Domain Management, which is why they get mistaken for settings on one product. They are three products, and because a domain publishes only one set of MX records, you get exactly one of them per domain at a time.

Option 1: free Email Forwarding, which cannot send

Forwarding takes mail sent to hello@yourdomain.com and drops it into an inbox you already read, usually a personal Gmail. Setup is genuinely two minutes:

1. Open Domain Management and click the envelope icon in the EMAIL column.
2. Find the Porkbun Email Forwarding section.
3. Enter the username, the part before the @, and the destination address.
4. Click Create Email Forward.

The limits, from Porkbun's forwarding guide: up to 20 free forwarding addresses per domain, and one forward can fan out to several recipients. Two restrictions matter more than the count. Wildcard and catch-all forwards are not supported, so every address has to be created by hand. And forwarding cannot send. Porkbun says so plainly: replies will show as having been sent from your personal email address.

That second one is the whole trap, and it is a forwarding trap rather than a Porkbun one. The message arrives in Gmail looking normal, you hit reply out of habit, and the customer gets an answer from you@gmail.com about an invoice they sent to billing@yourcompany.com. We wrote up the general version in what an email forwarding service does and where it breaks. Forwarding is a good way to make sure a half-built domain is not silently dropping mail. It is not a way to run support, and since the 2024 sender requirements Gmail's "Send mail as" no longer patches over it either, for reasons how to reply to email from a custom domain goes through.

Option 2: Porkbun Email hosting at $36 a year per address

This is the upgrade the dashboard nudges you toward, and it is a real mailbox: 10 GB of storage, webmail, POP3 and IMAP, so it works in Apple Mail or Thunderbird like anything else. Newly registered domains come with a 15-day free trial attached, which is how most people discover it.

Setup runs through the same envelope icon. Scroll to Pending Setup, click Configure next to the trial or the purchased plan, enter the address and a password, then click Create Email Address. That password is separate from your Porkbun account password, which trips people up later. Say yes when it offers to enable DKIM and DMARC: without them your outbound mail is a coin flip against spam filters.

If your DNS lives at Porkbun this is wired for you. If your nameservers are elsewhere, Porkbun documents the records you add by hand:

• MX fwd1.porkbun.com at priority 10 and fwd2.porkbun.com at priority 20.
• TXT SPF on the root: v=spf1 include:_spf.porkbun.com ~all.

The pricing is the part to read twice. From Porkbun's own setup guide: each hosted email address you configure and purchase is billed separately at $36 per year. Per address, not per domain. One inbox on one domain is $36 a year, about $3 a month, which is fine. But the number you care about is the one further down the page.

The bit nobody prices out: several domains

Porkbun's whole appeal is that domains are cheap enough to buy on a whim. Its email is not priced on that assumption. Billing is per address, and each domain needs at least one address of its own, so the cost of "every domain I own can be answered from" scales in a straight line:

None of that is a rip-off. $36 for a 10 GB IMAP mailbox is a fair price for a mailbox. It is a price built around one domain and one person, applied to a registrar whose customers reliably have eleven. The bill is also only half of it: five hosted addresses means five logins and five places to check before you can say nothing has been missed. That shape is not unique to Porkbun, and we normalised it across eight providers in business email cost per domain.

Option 3: point the domain at a third-party host

The third route keeps the domain registered at Porkbun and sends its mail somewhere else: Fastmail, Zoho, Proton, Migadu, a sending API, or a multi-domain inbox. Porkbun's DNS editor is one of the better ones, but four of its conventions cause almost every failed setup.

In Manage DNS Records you get Type, Host, Answer, TTL and Notes, plus a Priority field that appears for MX records. Then:

• Host is blank for the root domain. There is no @ here. Type @ and you get a record on a subdomain literally called @.
• Host omits your domain name. Paste send.yourdomain.com into Host and Porkbun happily creates send.yourdomain.com.yourdomain.com. Providers know this: Resend's Porkbun guide tells you to enter send. Strip your own domain off every hostname you copy.
• Two MX records cannot share a priority. If 10 is taken, the second needs 20 or 30. This is the one that produces mail that half arrives.
• A CNAME's Host cannot be blank and cannot collide with an existing record for the same name, which matters if your provider asks for a return-path CNAME.

Then there is the trap. At the bottom of the Email Hosting and Forwarding page sits a Fix DNS button, and what it does is configure the domain with Porkbun's own MX and SPF records. It exists to repair a broken Porkbun email setup and does that job well. Press it while a third-party host is configured and it quietly points your mail back at Porkbun. If mail stopped arriving at your new provider and nothing you changed explains it, check that button.

Delete the old MX records before adding the new ones, then verify from the provider's side rather than Porkbun's, and test in both directions. Sending one way only is how broken setups pass their own test.

Which route you actually want

• A parked domain you might build on: free forwarding, accepting that you cannot answer from it yet.
• One domain, one person, a normal mailbox: Porkbun Email at $36 a year. Real IMAP, real storage, done.
• Several domains that each need a real address: neither of the first two scales, because one is priced per mailbox and the other cannot reply. That is the case for option 3, and email hosting for multiple domains is worth reading before you buy five subscriptions of anything. The same three-door pattern, with different prices and a different trap, shows up at other registrars: see Namecheap email setup.

Where Mailyond fits

Mailyond is option 3, built for the Porkbun-shaped version of this problem: not one domain that needs email, but seven, most of them quiet, one or two busy, and no appetite for seven bills and seven logins.

The domains stay registered at Porkbun and the DNS stays on Porkbun's nameservers, with nothing to transfer. Per domain it is one 5-minute DNS setup, three records in the same Manage DNS Records editor above: a DKIM TXT, a Return-Path CNAME and an MX. Leave Host blank on the root records, strip your domain off any hostname you paste, and give the MX its own priority. That one setup makes the domain both receive and send, so there is no second pass for replies.

Mail for every connected domain then lands in a single inbox, tagged by domain and threaded, and the reply button sends authenticated as the address the message arrived at. The same domain also sends from your code through a Resend-compatible API key, the half a mailbox host does not cover. Pricing counts bundles of domains rather than mailboxes: $10 a month for five domains, $40 for thirty, sends and receives from one allowance. Plans are on the pricing page and there are 7 days free to point a real domain at it.

Where we are honestly not the answer: if you want a proper mailbox on one domain, 10 GB of storage and IMAP so a desktop client can sync it, Porkbun Email at $36 a year does that and we do not. Mailyond is an inbox for many domains, not a mailbox suite for one.

The short version

Porkbun email setup has three doors behind one envelope icon, and you get one per domain. Free forwarding gives you 20 addresses, no catch-all, and no way to reply as the address. Porkbun Email is a real 10 GB mailbox at $36 a year billed per address, fair for one domain and $180 a year by the time you have five. Custom MX hands the domain to any third-party host, with Porkbun's conventions to respect: blank Host on the root, no domain name in the Host field, unique MX priorities, and a Fix DNS button that points your mail straight back at Porkbun. If you own a pile of Porkbun domains and want all of them readable and answerable in one place, that third door is the one Mailyond was built for.