Using Smailor with Proton Mail

Smailor works alongside Proton Mail — you keep Proton for your team's internal and personal email, and add Smailor for your customer-facing support inbox. This guide shows you how to connect them in under 10 minutes.

How it works

Proton Mail handles email delivery for your team. Smailor adds a shared inbox layer on top: routing rules, ticket assignment, collision detection, AI triage, and response-time analytics — things Proton Business cannot do at any price tier.

The setup uses email forwarding: emails sent to your support address (e.g. [email protected]) are forwarded from Proton to your Smailor catch-all address. Smailor receives the ticket, your team handles it, and replies go out from [email protected] via Smailor's send infrastructure.

Prerequisites

• A Proton Mail account (any paid plan) with your custom domain configured
• A Smailor account (Free tier works — register here)
• Access to your domain's DNS settings

Step 1 — Add your domain to Smailor

1. Sign in to Smailor and go to Settings → Domains
2. Click Add domain and enter your domain (e.g. yourcompany.com)
3. Smailor will show you a catch-all email address — something like [email protected]. Copy this address.

You do not need to change your MX records. Smailor uses your existing email provider for delivery.

Step 2 — Create a support address in Proton

If you don't already have a [email protected] address:

1. In Proton Mail settings, go to Addresses (or Account → Addresses in Proton Business admin)
2. Add a new address: [email protected]
3. Optionally, create a dedicated mailbox for it or keep it as an alias on an existing account

Step 3 — Set up forwarding in Proton Mail

1. In Proton Mail, go to Settings → Filters (or Settings → Auto-reply & Forwarding depending on your plan)
2. Create a new forwarding rule:
   • From address / to address: [email protected] (or apply to all incoming mail on that address)
   • Forward to: your Smailor catch-all address from Step 1
3. Save the rule

Note: Proton encrypts email at rest in your Proton inbox. When you forward to Smailor, the email is decrypted as part of the forwarding process — this is standard behaviour for any email forwarding. Smailor stores the email in EU (Hetzner, Germany/Finland).

Step 4 — Add an inbox address in Smailor

1. In Smailor, go to Settings → Addresses
2. Click Add address and enter [email protected]
3. Select your domain from Step 1
4. Smailor will confirm the address is ready to receive email

Step 5 — Send a test email

Send an email to [email protected] from an external account (Gmail, Outlook, etc.).

Within a few seconds it should appear in your Smailor inbox. If it doesn't:

• Check that the Proton forwarding rule is active
• Verify the catch-all address in Smailor settings matches what you used in Proton
• Check the Relay health panel in Smailor dashboard for delivery logs

Step 6 — Reply through Smailor

When your team replies to a ticket in Smailor, the reply is sent from [email protected] using Smailor's sending infrastructure. Your customer receives a normal reply — they never see Smailor in the headers.

What works after setup

Keep Proton for everything else

Smailor only touches your support@ address. Your team's personal Proton inboxes ([email protected]) continue to work exactly as before, with full E2EE between Proton users.

Troubleshooting

Email arrives in Smailor but replies don't send
Go to Settings → Addresses in Smailor and confirm the address status is Active. If it shows a send error, check that your domain's SPF and DKIM records include Smailor's sending IPs (see EMAIL-SETUP for the DNS records to add).

Forwarding isn't working in Proton
Proton Business forwarding rules may require an admin account to configure. Log in as the domain admin and check Admin panel → Addresses → Forwarding.

Emails arrive with a delay
Forwarding adds a small delay (usually under 30 seconds). If delays exceed a few minutes, check Proton's forwarding logs in Settings → Filters to ensure the rule is firing.

Questions?

See Smailor vs Proton Business for a full feature and pricing comparison, or contact us at [email protected].