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As a hosting provider, you provision inbound filtering for your customer domains from a single Host Console. You add domains, prepare your mail servers to work with MailChannels, and hand off per-domain DNS configuration to domain admins — or complete it yourself if you’re acting in that role.

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Sign up for Inbound Filtering

Contact MailChannels Sales to get started with Inbound Filtering. A member of the sales team will reach you by email within 24 hours.

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Set up inbound filtering

If your servers run WHM/cPanel, the MailChannels cPanel plugin automates most of the manual steps below. If you’re not using the plugin, follow the steps in this guide to set up inbound filtering manually.
1

Navigate to Inbound in your Host Console

Once the MailChannels sales team has provisioned your account, log in to your Host Console and select Inbound from the left navigation menu.
2

Add your domains

From the Inbound menu, select Domains, then click Add Domains.You can add domains in three ways:
  • Single domain — enter one domain name and click Add.
  • Bulk upload — upload a CSV file with up to 10,000 domains per submission.
  • Provisioning API — automate domain provisioning programmatically. See the Provisioning API guide for details.
Once provisioned, all domains appear in your Host Console → Inbound → Domains list, where you can search and access each one.
Provisioning a domain in the Host Console does not route mail through MailChannels yet. Domain admins still need to complete DNS configuration before filtering is active.
3

Enable required downstream services

Your mail servers must support the same SMTP services advertised by the MailChannels MX servers. Specifically, SMTPUTF8 is required.MailChannels MX relay servers negotiate with the sender at the time of receipt. If your mail server doesn’t support SMTPUTF8, any message negotiated using UTF-8 encoding will be returned to the sender as undeliverable — it cannot be renegotiated at delivery time.Enable SMTPUTF8 globally on your mail server. The exact steps vary by software; consult your mail server’s documentation.
4

Safelist MailChannels service IPs

Your mail servers must accept connections from MailChannels delivery servers so that filtered mail can be forwarded to your downstream mail server. Add the MailChannels service IP addresses to your mail server’s allowlist.See Restrict inbound connections for the full IP list.
5

Configure domain routing

Each provisioned domain needs DNS configuration before filtering is active — MX records pointing to MailChannels and a downstream record pointing to the actual mail server.This can be completed by the hosting provider or delegated to the domain admin. You have two options:
The Login button gives you access to configure that domain’s settings, but does not promote you to domain administrator. To gain full administrative privileges, the domain admin must complete the domain admin promotion process.

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Next steps

Domain admin setup

Guide for domain admins to create an account, verify domain ownership, and configure MX records and downstream delivery.

Restrict inbound connections

Configure your mail servers to only accept inbound connections from MailChannels for domains protected by inbound filtering.

Safelists & Blocklists

Configure global safelists and blocklists that apply across all your provisioned domains.

Provisioning API

Automate domain provisioning at scale using the MailChannels Provisioning API.