- Too few mailboxes and staff share passwords; too many and you pay for ghosts.
- This guide gives a simple formula for the right number of accounts at each stage of business growth.
When Nepali businesses set up email, they swing between extremes: a single info@ shared by everyone, or a paid mailbox for every conceivable purpose. Both cost you — the first in security and accountability, the second in wasted licence fees. Here is a practical formula.
The Base Rule: One Mailbox Per Human
Every staff member who writes email needs their own account. Shared passwords make it impossible to know who promised what to a customer, and when someone leaves you must reset credentials everyone else uses. At Zoho prices from around NPR 195 per user per month, individual accounts are cheaper than one confused customer dispute.
Role Addresses: Aliases, Not Accounts
Public-facing role addresses should almost always be aliases or forwarders pointing at real people:
- info@ — alias to whoever handles general enquiries
- sales@ — alias or forwarder to the sales team
- support@ — alias, or a shared mailbox once volume justifies it
- careers@ — forwarder to HR
Aliases cost nothing on virtually every platform, so a five-person company can present a dozen professional addresses while paying for five users.
The Exceptions That Deserve Real Mailboxes
- accounts@ or billing@ — financial history must survive staff changes and be independently securable.
- Any address used to register services — domains, hosting, banking portals and government systems should recover to a company-owned mailbox, never a personal one.
- High-volume support — once support mail exceeds what one person handles, a shared mailbox or ticketing tool beats forwarding chaos.
A Sizing Guide by Business Stage
| Stage | Paid mailboxes | Aliases/forwarders |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer | 1–2 | info@, hello@ |
| Small team (3–10) | Staff + accounts@ | info@, sales@, support@ |
| Growing SME (10–50) | Staff + shared team boxes | Departmental aliases |
Reviewing and Pruning Yearly
Audit accounts every year, ideally before renewal: suspend mailboxes of departed staff after archiving them, convert quiet mailboxes into aliases, and check that recovery addresses on critical services still point at live company accounts. Most SMEs we audit in Kathmandu save 15–30% of their email spend in the first review.
A Worked Example of the Savings
A 12-person Kathmandu marketing agency reviewed for the first time found six mailboxes still active for staff who had left over the previous two years, three duplicate role addresses that could be consolidated into a single alias with send-as enabled, and one enterprise-tier plan that had never actually used the shared calendar or advanced admin features it was priced for. Downgrading to the correct tier and removing the dormant mailboxes cut the monthly bill by roughly a third, with zero impact on any active user — the review took under an hour and the savings compounded every month afterward, which is the realistic scale of what a yearly audit tends to surface once an account structure has been running unreviewed for a while.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should the owner use info@ as a personal address?
No. Give the owner a named address and keep info@ as an alias — it lets you delegate general enquiries later without exposing the owner mailbox.
What happens to mail of staff who leave?
Archive the mailbox, set an auto-reply naming the replacement for one to three months, then convert the address to an alias for the successor.
Are unlimited-mailbox hosting plans better value?
Only for very small storage needs — unlimited counts of mailboxes still share one limited pool of disk and server reputation.
We design mailbox structures free with every plan — compare business email and corporate email hosting, or get a recommendation.
