Integrations

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

DNS propagation usually takes a few minutes but can take up to an hour depending on your registrar’s TTL. The domain detail page shows the current status and will flip to Active once routing is live.

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 — Disconnect a domain (handlers and received emails for that domain are deleted)

If a domain’s status shows as Failed, hover the error message for details. The most common causes are DNS records that haven’t propagated yet or MX records pointing at the wrong host.

Troubleshooting

Domain is stuck in pending. DNS is still propagating. Give it up to an hour, then reload the domain detail page.

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.