The checkbox that would have deleted my business email
I rebuilt my site as static HTML and needed to point askismaeel.space away from Hostinger's website builder and onto the hosting plan.
Routine job. Detach the domain from one site, connect it to the other. DNS stays where it is, email is unaffected, done in five minutes.
That reasoning was wrong, and the dialog box told me so about two seconds before I would have clicked confirm.
What I expected
Email routing lives in MX records in the domain's DNS zone. Which website a domain points at is an A record. Different records, different jobs. Changing the website mapping shouldn't touch mail.
I checked the DNS first — MX records for mx1 and mx2.hostinger.com present, SPF, DKIM and DMARC all intact. All good.
What actually happens
The confirmation dialog said:
Your free email plan will be reset and any linked mailboxes will be deleted.
My MX records would have survived perfectly. They'd have pointed at a mailbox that no longer existed.
The reason is that Hostinger's free email plan is bundled to the website–domain connection rather than to the domain itself. Break that connection and the mailbox is deprovisioned. The DNS reasoning was right; it just wasn't the thing that mattered.
What I did instead
- Backed the mailbox up first. Added the account to a desktop client over IMAP and let it fully sync. Whatever happened next, the mail existed somewhere else.
- Used the "transfer or upgrade" path in that same dialog rather than accepting the deletion. Paid email plans aren't tied to the website bundle, so once the mailbox is on one, the domain can move freely.
- Only then connected the domain to the hosting plan.
The bit I'd have missed
My contact forms send through the Hostinger Mail API, and the API endpoint includes the mailbox's resource ID:
/api/v1/mailboxes/ACe774a021c735c1446cbfd036c7b2/send
If the mailbox had been deleted and recreated, that ID would have changed. The automation would have kept running and silently failed to send anything — no error on the website, just enquiries quietly going nowhere.
That's the second-order failure. The obvious risk was losing emails. The hidden risk was a broken integration pointing at a dead identifier, which nobody notices until someone asks why you never replied.
What I took from it
Two things.
Infrastructure that's free is usually bundled to something. The bundling is where the surprise lives. It's worth asking what a free tier is attached to before you move the thing it's attached to.
When a confirmation dialog lists consequences, read all of them. I nearly didn't. I was confident about the DNS, and confidence about one part of a system is exactly what stops you reading warnings about a different part.