Omucloud Identities
A mailbox has always been one address belonging to one person. Everything beyond that — aliases, forwarding rules, distribution lists, shared mailboxes, delegated send-as — was bolted on afterwards. Omucloud has one idea instead: an identity, and the rights you hold on it.
Everywhere else this is six features. Here it is one idea.
Email can already send one address to several people. It just does it with a different mechanism for every shape of the problem — each configured somewhere else, each behaving slightly differently, and most of them named badly enough that nobody is sure which one they need. None of that is the feature. It is the cost of not having one.
Usual email providers
6 in 5 places
Six different features, in five different places, answering six slightly different questions. Set the wrong one up and the mail still arrives — it is the reply that goes out from the wrong address, which is the half nobody tests.
Omucloud Identities
1 idea
An identity is an address plus the rights a person holds on it. Her own alice@ sits in the same inbox as the three shared ones, and she answers as whichever address was written to — except info@, which she reads and was never granted the right to answer as.
Two directions, and the second one is the one nobody offers.
One identity, many inboxes
accounts@ can reach three people or thirty. Each copy lands in that person's own inbox, wearing a tag that says which address brought it — so nobody has to wonder why a letter addressed to the company is sitting in their mail.
One inbox, many identities
The same inbox can hold your own name, the address your team answers on, and an address on a second domain entirely. One sign-in covers all of them, because they were never separate accounts to begin with.
Nothing is shared but the address
An identity has no password, because it has no login. There is no credential to circulate when somebody joins, and nothing to change when somebody leaves — the grant is removed and their copy of the address is gone.
Everything you are allowed to read, in one place — and everyone stays themselves.
01
However many addresses you hold, one inbox
Alice reads accounts@, privacy@ and info@ as well as her own mail, and all of it arrives in the one list. Each message wears the address it was written to, so a subject access request never reads as a note to Alice — and there is no second mailbox anybody has to remember to go and check.
02
You answer as the address, not as yourself
Pick it on the From line and the reply leaves as that address, DKIM-signed by your domain, so the person on the other end sees the address they wrote to. The list is exactly what you hold — info@ sits in it greyed out, because Alice reads that address and was never granted the right to answer as it.
03
Everyone can see it has been answered
This is the one that decides whether a shared address is usable at all. The moment a colleague replies, the message is marked answered for everyone it reached, with their name on it — so the second person to open it finds out before they start writing, not after.
Sent stays yours. What you send sits in your own Sent folder, with a switch into the shared outbox when you want to see what the whole team has sent as the address.
Trash is per person. Clearing a shared message out of your own inbox does exactly that. It never reaches into anybody else's copy, and it never destroys the record.
Three fields, and there is no password step.
The domain owner does this once. What is missing from the form is the point: a shared address has no credential, so there is no step that hands one out.
01
Open Settings → Email addresses.
You will see choices of Human users and Identities. Choose Identities.
02
Name it.
Decide a name for your identities - common ones are info, privacy, hello, billing, etc.
03
Who reads it, and who answers as it
Receive puts a copy in that person's own inbox. Send as is offered only over the names already in Receive: nobody answers as an address they cannot read.
An identity is an address and a right. It is not a person.
- Not a user
- An identity has no password and no sign-in of its own. It is an address that routes, and a right that people hold — never a seat somebody logs into.
- Not a calendar
- A shared address has no calendar. An invitation sent to one still arrives, and still opens as a readable file; it just does not put an event on a calendar nobody owns.
- Not a second quota
- Files on a shared address are counted against the domain rather than against whoever happened to open the message. One team, one number.
Making one takes about a minute
Three fields under Settings → Email addresses, on the Identities tab. No password is created at any point.
Related readings
- How to set up a custom domain for email
The MX, SPF and DKIM records that put your domain on Omucloud, and where to publish them at your registrar.
- Why it is free, and what the catch is
Unlimited addresses and unlimited people is an unusual promise. This is the reasoning behind it.
- Business email on your phone
The same shared addresses in a native iOS app — the tag, the From picker and all.
Four people, two shared addresses, four ordinary inboxes.
@finance reaches two of them. @marketing reaches three. The one in the middle holds both, and answers as whichever address was written to. None of them signed in as anything but themselves.
