Startupkit Email

Receive inbound emails on your own domain using Startupkit's managed mail service. Add a domain, point an MX record, and you're done.

What It Is

Startupkit Email is a managed inbound mail service. Add your domain, point its MX record at our mail server, and Startupkit starts receiving email for any address on that domain. Incoming messages flow into Kit where they can power the catch-all candidate inbox, per-job email inboxes, or anywhere else Kit listens for inbound mail.

You don’t need your own mail server, a Cloudflare account, or any API tokens. Startupkit runs the infrastructure; you just tell DNS where to send mail.

When to Use It

Pick Startupkit Email when:

You want the simplest possible setup (one DNS record, no third-party accounts)
You don’t already run Cloudflare Email Routing on the domain you want to use
You want Startupkit to handle uptime, spam filtering, and delivery

Pick Cloudflare Email Routing instead when your domain is already on Cloudflare and you’d rather keep mail routing there.

Both options live side by side on the Inbound Email page. You can switch between them at any time — no migration required.

Setup

1. Add Your Domain

Navigate to Integrations > Startupkit Email and click Add Domain. Enter the domain you want to receive mail on (for example, mail.yourcompany.com). Startupkit provisions the domain on its mail server and shows you the MX record you need to publish.

Use a subdomain like mail.yourcompany.com if your main domain already receives email from another provider. That way Startupkit handles inbound mail for candidate addresses without touching the rest of your setup.

2. Publish the MX Record

Add the following MX record at your DNS provider:

Type	Host	Priority	Value
MX	your domain	10	shown on the domain detail page

The domain flips to Active as soon as Startupkit finishes provisioning it on our mail server. That happens server-side and does not wait for your DNS to propagate — an Active status means Kit is ready to receive mail, not that your records are live yet.

Whether your MX record has actually propagated is tracked separately. DNS propagation usually takes a few minutes but can take up to an hour depending on your registrar’s TTL, and the domain detail page shows a per-record DNS check (MX, plus DKIM, SPF, and DMARC) with a “Last checked” timestamp. Each record turns green once Startupkit’s resolver sees it live at your registrar.

3. Add Email Handlers

Once the domain is active, create email handlers — these are the individual addresses Startupkit listens for. For example, a handler named apply on domain mail.yourcompany.com creates the inbox [email protected].

Handlers are where inbound mail becomes useful to Kit:

Connect a handler to the catch-all candidate inbox to route any email to the matching open role
Attach a handler to a specific job posting so candidate replies land on that application
Use a handler as a contact address that Kit routes into a specific workflow

Managing Domains

From the Startupkit Email index page you can:

Add Domain — Register another domain
View — See the DNS status, handlers, and recent activity for a domain
Remove — Removing a domain takes two clicks. On an active domain, the first Remove disconnects it: Startupkit tears the domain down on our mail server and its status changes to Disabled. Nothing is deleted yet. Click Remove again on the now-inactive domain to permanently delete it, along with its handlers and any received emails.

If a domain’s status shows as Failed, hover the error message for details. Failed means Startupkit hit an error while provisioning the domain on our mail server (an admin-API error on our side) — it does not indicate a DNS problem on your end. DNS issues never surface as a Failed status; they show up in the separate per-record DNS checks on the domain detail page. If the error mentions authentication or a rejected request, retry from the domain detail page; if it persists, contact support.

Troubleshooting

Domain is stuck in pending. Startupkit is still provisioning the domain on our mail server; this normally completes in well under a minute. Pending reflects our provisioning, not your DNS propagation — reload the domain detail page, and if it stays pending, the setup job may be retrying. (Whether your DNS has propagated is shown separately by the per-record DNS checks.)

Mail isn’t arriving. Check that the MX record is published exactly as shown on the domain detail page, including the priority. Use dig MX yourdomain.com to confirm from the command line.

Can I use my main domain? Yes, but only if your main domain isn’t already used for outbound mail from another provider. Otherwise use a subdomain like mail.yourcompany.com to keep things separate.

Does Startupkit send outbound email too? Not on this domain. Startupkit Email handles inbound only. Outbound transactional email is configured separately under SMTP settings.

Thin Applications

Candidates who apply by email sometimes send only a one-line message with no resume, no LinkedIn, no portfolio. Kit flags those as thin applications with an amber banner on the recruiter view, so you can spot them before screening.

If you’d rather not chase candidates manually, turn on Auto-request more info in Inbound Email settings. When enabled, Kit emails the candidate a short, polite note asking for the missing pieces and links them to a private supplement page where they can:

Upload a CV
Paste a LinkedIn, GitHub, or portfolio URL
Add a short paragraph about themselves

The link is tokenized per application and expires after 14 days. Anything the candidate adds attaches to their existing application. No new account, no password.

The auto-request email is off by default. The wording is fully customizable alongside Kit’s other transactional emails (it’s the 14th template type). Edit it under your account’s email template settings.