Quickstart

1. Add your domain

Create an account, confirm your email address, then open Domains and add the domain you want to receive mail for. You do not need to prove ownership separately — pointing the MX records at MXcatch is the proof, and nothing is accepted until they resolve.

2. Set two MX records

At whatever DNS provider hosts the domain, create these two records on the apex:

your-domain.com.  MX  10  mx1.mxcatch.net.
your-domain.com.  MX  20  mx2.mxcatch.net.

Both must be present. MXcatch checks for both hosts and marks the domain healthy only when it finds them together — the second one is the redundancy that keeps mail flowing when the first host is unreachable.

Remove any other MX records for the domain. A leftover record pointing at Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or your registrar's default mail service will keep taking delivery, and mail will never reach MXcatch. Per-provider steps are in the MX records guide.

Propagation is usually a couple of minutes and occasionally up to an hour, depending on the TTL that was on the old records. The domain page shows the live check result and emails you when the status changes.

3. Create an alias

An alias is the part before the @. Create hello to receive mail at hello@your-domain.com, or turn on catch-all so that every address on the domain is accepted, including ones you have never created. Catch-all is the right default if you use a fresh address per signup — see catch-all email addresses.

4. Add an action

An alias with no actions still receives mail — it just lands in the MXcatch inbox and stops there. Add one or more actions to do something with it:

• Forward — deliver the original message to an existing mailbox, attachments intact.
• Archive to storage — copy the raw .eml and every attachment into object storage under a prefix you choose.
• Slack — post a summary into a channel via an incoming webhook URL.
• Webhook — POST the parsed message as signed JSON to your own endpoint.

Actions run in the order you arrange them, and each one retries on its own schedule if it fails. Full details in Actions.

5. Send a test email

Mail the alias from any account you have. Within a few seconds it should appear in the MXcatch inbox, and your action should have fired.

If nothing arrives, work through this in order:

1. Run dig MX your-domain.com +short. You should see both MXcatch hosts and nothing else.
2. Check the domain page — if the MX status is not healthy, DNS has not propagated or an old record is still winning.
3. Check the logs. A message with status filtered was dropped by a routing rule; failed means the message arrived but the action could not complete, and the error is recorded alongside it.
4. Confirm you are under the daily message limit for your plan.

Next steps

• Verify webhook signatures so your endpoint only trusts genuine MXcatch deliveries.
• Add routing rules to split mail by sender or subject.
• Archive everything if you need mail kept past your plan's retention window.