One mailbox per person, and then more addresses than you expect. The number that matters is not how many addresses you create but how many of them cost you a seat.
The count, for a company of four
Take a company with two founders and two early hires. Each of the four needs an address that is theirs, so that is four mailboxes. Then the company itself needs doors: somewhere for customers to write, somewhere for invoices to land, somewhere a security researcher can reach you, somewhere a journalist can. That is another five to eight addresses, and almost none of them need to be a separate inbox.
The distinction that decides your bill is mailbox versus alias. A mailbox has its own login, its own storage and its own folders. An alias is just a name that delivers into a mailbox that already exists. On a host that charges per user, every mailbox is a seat; aliases are usually free but limited. On a flat-rate host, the distinction only matters for how you want the mail organised.
The addresses, role by role
| Address | Mailbox or alias | Why |
|---|---|---|
| first@ for each person | Mailbox | Their own login, their own history. Never shared. |
| hello@ or info@ | Mailbox | Your public front door. It gets volume, and more than one person will answer it. |
| support@ | Mailbox | Threads live here for months. It needs its own folders and its own search. |
| billing@ | Alias to the founder who pays bills | Invoices and receipts, low volume, one owner. |
| security@ | Alias to a founder | Vulnerability reports and provider warnings. Must exist, rarely busy. |
| legal@ and privacy@ | Alias to a founder | Terms questions, data requests. Required by some regulations once you have EU users. |
| press@ | Alias to hello@ | Journalists try it. Costs nothing to catch. |
| jobs@ or careers@ | Alias, until you hire monthly | Becomes a mailbox when applications need their own place. |
| Catch-all | Delivers to hello@ | Catches typos like helo@ and old addresses nobody updated. |
Nine addresses for a four-person company. Six of them are aliases, which is why the count of mailboxes stays at six.
Two rules sit behind that table. An address becomes a mailbox when more than one person will read it or when its history needs to be searchable on its own. Everything else is an alias, because an alias costs nothing to create and nothing to abandon.
What the same plan costs on a per-seat host
On Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 the four personal mailboxes are four seats. hello@ and support@ can be handled without extra seats, through a Google Group used as a collaborative inbox or a Microsoft 365 shared mailbox, but both come with rules: a shared mailbox cannot be signed into directly, and a group is not quite a mailbox. Most small teams end up buying a fifth seat for support@ because it is simpler, and the bill climbs with every hire.
On Faivelo the plan above is $6 a month in total on the Starter plan. All six mailboxes, all the aliases and the catch-all are included, and the seventh and eighth mailbox cost the same nothing as the first. The reason to mention this is not the saving at four people, which is modest. It is that you can give every new hire and every new role address a real mailbox on day one without thinking about the bill, which is what a startup actually wants.
A worked plan you can copy
Here is the address plan for a four-person company called Ridgeway, written the way you would hand it to the person doing the setup. Two founders, Anna Keller and Ben Wright, an engineer, Tom Becker, and a first support hire, Dana Fox.
Mailboxes: anna@, ben@, tom@, dana@, hello@, support@. Anna, Ben and Dana all have access to hello@; Dana and Ben have access to support@. Aliases: billing@ goes to ben@, security@ goes to tom@, legal@ and privacy@ go to anna@, press@ goes to hello@, jobs@ goes to anna@. The catch-all goes to hello@ so that nothing a customer misspells is lost.
That is six mailboxes and six aliases. It takes about fifteen minutes to create on a host where mailboxes are a click each, and nothing in it needs to be revisited until the company is twenty people.
An address becomes a mailbox when more than one person reads it, or when its history needs its own search.
When to add more, and when not to
Add a mailbox when an alias starts getting enough mail that the person receiving it wants it out of their inbox. jobs@ is the usual first one, around the first proper hiring round. Add a sales@ mailbox when a second person starts answering leads. Add a mailbox for a contractor only if they will represent you to customers; otherwise an alias that forwards to their own address is enough and easier to revoke.
Do not create a mailbox for every tool. noreply@, notifications@ and the addresses your app sends from should be aliases or sending identities on a transactional API, not inboxes someone has to check. And do not give a shared tool a personal login: when that person leaves, the login goes with them.
If you are still choosing a host, best email provider for startups walks through the options with this same four-person company in mind.
Create the whole plan in one sitting
Add your domain, create the six mailboxes and six aliases from the table, and switch on the catch-all. On Faivelo all of it is $6 a month, and the next hire costs nothing extra.