Ordering a Mailspace

Mailspace is CloudPress's mailbox hosting: real mailboxes on your own domain, with aliases, groups, and mailing lists. This guide covers placing the order — choosing a plan, picking the domain, paying — and what you'll see while the mailspace is being created. It does not cover managing mailboxes afterwards.

A Mailspace belongs to the workspace, not to a particular WordPress site, and you do not need a site to order one. (Mailspace is also not the same thing as Transactional Email, which handles the mail a WordPress site sends itself.)

Steps

1. Open Mailspace. In the left sidebar, choose Mailspace. The page lists the mailspaces in this workspace under the heading Mailspace, with the subtitle Manage your mailboxes and domains and a filter box (placeholder Filter accounts or domains…). If you have none yet, you'll see No Mailspace accounts yet and Order email hosting for your domains.

2. Start the order. Click New Mailspace at the top right of the list. That button is always there, including when the list is empty; the empty state adds a second button, Set Up Mailspace, which goes to the same place. Two other routes reach it as well:

   • The New menu — in the header on a wide screen, in the sidebar drawer on a narrow one — has a New Mailspace item.
   • A domain's own page has an Email card. On a domain that has no mail with us, which button it offers depends on where the domain's mail goes today: with no mail records at all it offers Add Mailspace, and with mail already being delivered somewhere else it offers Move to Mailspace. Either button carries the domain through to checkout, so you don't have to pick it again later.

3. Choose a plan. The New Mailspace page (subtitle Select a plan to continue) shows the mail plans available to your workspace as selectable cards. Each card carries the plan's name on a badge, the price, the label per year, how much storage the plan includes, and how many mailboxes it allows. The plan we recommend most often carries a Most popular badge beside its name. Click a card to select it — the button on the card changes from Choose to Selected ✓ — then click Continue to Cart. Cancel returns you to the Mailspace list.

4. Choose the domain. In the cart, a Choose your domain card asks for the domain the mail is for: Search for the domain you want to host email for — register a new one, or use a domain you already own. Type it into Domain name (placeholder yourbrand.com) and click Search, then:

   • To register the domain with us, click Use this domain on the available result — it's the primary button on every result we can sell you. The registration becomes a second line on the same order.
   • If the domain is already registered in this workspace, its result is badged as yours and offers Use this domain too. That points the domain at our mail service without buying anything.
   • If we can't sell you that name — it's taken by someone else, it's a premium name, or it's an extension we don't sell — the result offers I already own this instead. That points the domain at our mail service without buying or transferring it.

   In both of those last two cases the cart then shows Existing domain added to Mailspace.

   If domain registration isn't available, this card is replaced by a simpler one that just takes a Domain name and a Use this domain button.

   You'll skip this step entirely if you started from a domain's Email card — that domain is already linked to the order.

5. Check the mail line. The cart shows the Mailspace line with its price and a renewal note in the form Renews at {price}/yr. Cancel anytime. Remove the line here if you picked the wrong plan, and start again from step 3.

6. Pay. On the payment page, confirm your billing details and enter or confirm a payment method, then click the pay button — it's labelled Pay followed by the amount due. If account credit covers the whole total, the button reads Confirm change instead. A workspace whose billing plan doesn't settle through us gets a simpler page — the order summary and a Process order button, with no payment details to enter.

7. Wait for the order to finish. The order status page tracks the work. When it completes it offers Back to Mailspace (or Take me to my mailspace if the order also registered a domain), both of which return you to the Mailspace list.

8. Verify the domain, if you're asked to. The mailspace is created only after payment settles. For a domain registered with us under this workspace's billing family we can confirm ownership ourselves and go straight to creating the account. That is the only shortcut: running the domain's DNS with us is not proof of ownership, so a domain registered elsewhere still gets the step below even when we host its zone. For any other domain the new row shows an Awaiting verification badge and a Verify domain button, which opens a Verify yourdomain.com page holding a single Verification record — a DNS TXT record, listed with its Type, Name / Host, and Value. Add that record at whoever runs DNS for the domain, then click Verify domain now. We also re-check on our own every few minutes, so you can leave the page and come back. The record is only used to confirm ownership and can be removed once the domain is verified; DNS changes take a few minutes to spread.

   Ownership verification has more to it than fits here — the setup page walks you through it.

9. Let it provision. Once the domain is verified, the same page reports yourdomain.com is verified. We're creating your mailspace account now — this usually takes under a minute, and this page updates on its own. You'll see Creating your mailspace account… while that runs, and All done when it finishes.

10. Open the finished mailspace. The setup page then offers Continue to your mailspace account, and on the Mailspace list the row's button becomes Manage. The list row shows the Account, Domain, Package, and Usage columns, and the mailspace's own Overview page is where you add your first mailbox with New Mailbox.

Ordering over the API

The same purchase is available as POST /api/mailspace, which builds the identical dedicated mail cart and charges it off-session. Four differences matter:

• It returns 202 Accepted — the mailspace does not exist yet at that point, so poll the cart in the response envelope rather than expecting an ID.
• A 202 does not mean the charge succeeded. A declined off-session charge is also a 202; the envelope reports payment.status as "awaiting_authentication" and carries a payment.hosted_invoice_url to pay through. Branch on payment.status, never on the HTTP status alone.
• The domain must already exist (registered with us or at another registrar). The API cannot register a new domain as part of the mail order the way the dashboard's domain picker can; a domain that isn't registered anywhere is rejected with domain_not_registered.
• A domain that already has a mailspace is rejected with 422 and the code mailspace_exists — including one whose mailspace is only scheduled for deletion, because the domain stays claimed for the whole retention window (see below).

curl -X POST "https://my.cloudpress.com/api/mailspace" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLOUDPRESS_TOKEN" -H "X-Auth-Account: $ACCOUNT_ID" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain": "example.com", "package": "mail_50"}'

See Mailspace for the package names, the response envelope, and the full error list.

Next steps

• Add the domain's mail DNS records. If we run the domain's DNS, see Managing DNS; otherwise add them at your own DNS provider.
• Create your first mailbox from the mailspace's Overview page.
• Check the workspace's payment method under Billing if the charge didn't go through — see Adding a payment method.