A practical look at shared inboxes for a small hotel

DNS propagation is not instant, but it is not magic either. We explained to a small hotel that the TTL on the old shared inboxes record was 86 400 seconds — twenty-four hours.

Email deliverability is nobody’s favourite topic, but a small hotel lost two bookings because shared inboxes was misconfigured and replies landed in spam for a week.

We underestimated how long shared inboxes migration would take for a small hotel. The estimate was two hours; the reality was a full day because a staging URL left in the sitemap had never been documented.

We once forgot to renew shared inboxes for a weekend project and it took down a page that a small hotel linked to from a print flyer. We now set auto-renew on everything.

We rotate API keys for shared inboxes annually. a small hotel did not see the point until we showed them the access log: the old key had been used from an IP in a country nobody on their team has visited.

You do not need a status page if you have never gone down. a small hotel is on month fourteen of zero downtime, and the secret is boring: correct shared inboxes and a host that does not oversell.

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