Test Your Email Address
Since Google confirmed that you correctly entered the MX records, this is technically not a necessary step.
But its the fastest way to take your new branded email for a spin inside the Gmail inbox.
Open another email account, Gmail, Outlook, AOL, it doesnt matter. Compose a new email and enter your new email address in the To field.
Write a random subject like First email and send it.
Now, head over to Gmail and log in with your Google Workspace credentials.
If you did everything correctly, you should see the test email you send from your other account in your inbox.
You can also try composing and sending an email the other way around to confirm that you can send mails without issue as well.
How To Set Up A Custom Email Address
Few things make you look as professional as a custom email address. Theres a big difference between getting an email from johndoe@gmail.com and one from john@doeenterprises.com. People want to do business with the latter, but they might not trust the former as much.
Fortunately, setting up a professional email address is pretty straightforward. If you already have a domain, you can easily use it to create custom email addresses. All you have to do is pay for email hosting, which is a service most providers offer . Lets go over how that process works!
Registering A Domain Name
To register your domain with Hover, simply add it to your cart, select a term length , enter your contact and billing information and click register.
Example domain checkout. You may also have the option to purchase an email address at checkout.
Important note! Registering a domain name does not mean that you own it forever. Once the initial time you paid for has passed, youll need to renew it in order to continue owning it. If you dont do this, youll no longer own the domain and it will be available for anyone else to register. Oh and, your email will stop working too.
Enable auto-renew within your account settings to make sure you dont forget to renew your domain.
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Connect To Your Email Provider
How you connect your domain to your email host depends on where you registered your domain name. If you registered a domain name through an all-in-one domain and email hosting service like Google Workspace, youll simply follow the remaining prompts and the work is done for you. On the other hand, if you registered your domain through a web hosting service, site builder, or another third-party service, you may need to take additional steps.
For example, if you got your domain as part of your web hosting plan, you need to navigate to your web hosting providers instructions on how to set up your new business email address. For most, you will see an option labeled Email from within your account dashboard. Follow the prompts to set up your custom email address.
From there, all you need to do is decide how you would like your email address formatted. For help deciding which is right for your business, learn more about choosing a professional email address.
How Should You Set Up An Email Account With Your Domain Name
Lets get this out of the way first: Your best option for setting up an email with your own domain is to use an externally hosted email service.
An externally hosted email service will handle everything for you, offering the security and reliability that are crucial when dealing with email.
The best externally hosted email service is Googles G Suite. G Suite offers Gmail-style email along with a calendar, a document editor, and online storage — all on your own domain from $5 per user per month. Well show you everything you need to know to set up G Suite later in this guide.
If youre trying to keep costs down, external email hosting service Zoho offers many similar features to G Suite, but with the option of opening a basic account free of charge. This guide will also cover everything you need to set up Zoho later on.
You may have noticed your hosting provider also offers free email services. Indeed, most shared hosts, such as SiteGround, DreamHost, and Bluehost offer free email at your domain out of the box . These are okay as a temporary solution while youre starting out, but we dont recommend them for the long term: . For instance, you wont get the two-factor authentication that will keep your email safe, and unreliable spam settings can cause you to miss important business while failing to catch actual spam. Youll also experience limited storage, and typically have to use poorly designed desktop and mobile user interfaces.
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How To Use Gmail With Your Own Custom Domain Name For Free
In this first method, Ill show you how to set up Gmail with your custom email for free.
With this method, youll be able to link your custom domain name to a regular free Gmail account . Then, youll be able to send/receive emails using your custom domain from your regular Gmail account.
When you compose a new message, you can choose between your free @gmail.com address and your gmail custom domain. If you receive an email at your custom domain, Gmail will automatically respond using that email:
How We Evaluated The Best Free Email Domain Providers
The best email domain providers include a lot more than just a free domain name for business emails. The best business email services include top-level domains , as well as secure, reliable, ad-free email hosting. We analyzed more than a dozen leading email hosting services and found three top-notch providers for professional business email that are quick, affordable, and legitimate.
Heres how we determined the three best small business options for creating a free email domain:
- Free top-level domain included
- Reliable and secure email hosting
- Ability to connect to third-party email providers
- Ad-free email hosting
Lets take a closer look at the three best ways to get your free email domain:
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Why Is It Important To Create A Professional Email Address
Chances are incredibly high that you will email potential and existing clients regularly. Its often the first stage of networking and building a relationship online.
That makes your email address a crucial part of your brand, one that you should protect and improve as much as possible.
As a freelancer or business owner, you cant afford the first impression an email address like gives off.
First off, its hard to correctly judge who the email is from, at a glance. Second, even with a more serious email like , your email recipients have no easy way of confirming your identity.
Anybody can create a Gmail or Outlook address with any name. How can a potential client confirm that you are who you say you are unless your email address backs you up?
An unwillingness to invest in a professional email address indicates that youre not very serious about your business. Thats why you want an email address like or
How Do You Set Up A Professional Email Signature
If youre using Gmail, set up your email signature by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner. Then select Settings and scroll down to find the Signature box, where you can input your signature.
Alternatively, you can design a professional email signature using a signature generator like WiseStamp. WiseStamp lets you create a customized professional email signature that includes images, links, icons, and morewith no coding knowledge. Learn more about the best email signature generators.
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Is It Possible To Create A Free Business Email Address Without Developing Any Website
Yes, you can create a free email address without developing any website. However, you will still have to pay for domain name registration. Domain name registration and email hosting service come free with a web hosting package. You need to sign up on the website of the hosting service provider, and then simply create your free domain email.
Create The Domain Name Email Address
Now all the emails sent to will be sent to your personal email address.
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What Is The Best Way To Get A Free Email Domain B12 Your Digital Marketing Partner
Free email is great, but youre probably looking for ways to reduce your entire spend on your website and marketing strategy, right?
If thats the case, we recommend you check out B12.
B12 offers you an affordable way to launch your website.
A professionally-designed site with all the marketing and SEO functions we mentioned could cost upwards of $8,000 or more.
With B12, you get all the advantages of a fully functional and professionally designed website for an affordable monthly subscription.
We are revolutionizing the web design and development process using the best of artificial intelligence. Our unique approach allows us to make the process more efficient and build a website thats not only ready for your visitors, but for search engines as well.
You get a custom email address with a control panel, a new domain, free business email, and email marketing included with your purchase.
Learn more about B12 or, for your free website draft today!
Create A Regular Free Gmail Account
To get started, create a regular free Gmail account e.g. username@gmail.com. If you already have a Gmail account, you can use your existing account.
However, remember that the emails for your custom domain will be mixed in with any emails to your regular Gmail account, so it might be simpler to create a separate account if youre already receiving a lot of email at your Gmail address.
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What Is The Best Way To Acquire A Free Website
There are many options for creating a free website, including utilizing a site builder like Weebly with a subdomain or using an open source content management system like WordPress. WordPress, which is free to use and allows you to link a custom domain with third-party web hosting, is the greatest choice for those constructing a professional company website. Learn more about how to create a website for your small company.
Allow Gmail To Send Emails Using Smtp
At this point, new emails to your custom domain should show up in your Gmail account. However, you wont be able to reply to them from your custom email domain yet.
To fix that, you need to configure your Gmail account to send through your custom emails SMTP server. Typically, youll find your emails SMTP server information at the same spot where you found the POP3 information:
Once you have your SMTP information:
This will open another popup window that has multiple steps.
On the first screen:
- Enter the custom email address that youre using.
- Check the box for Treat as an alias.
Next, enter the SMTP information from your email host:
- SMTP Server and Port from your email host.
- Username normally, this is your full email address, but sometimes its only the part that comes before @.
- Password the password that you set when creating your custom email address.
- Choose whichever Secured connection method that Gmail recommends.
- Click Add Account.
Gmail will then send a confirmation code to your custom email address. You need to click the link in that email and click Confirm to finish the process.
Since you already configured Gmail to receive emails from your custom domain name, you should be able to receive this email from your Gmail account. It might take a few minutes for Gmail to fetch the email from your server.
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How To Set Up And Use Your Shared Hosts Email Service With Your Domain Name
Many web hosting providers also offer free email services. As weve discussed, these dont offer the same reliability or security found with dedicated email providers. If youre just starting out or emailing occasionally, however, the ease of use of web hostsâ email services make them a good choice.
Most web hosts offering email services are shared hosts, and use an industry-standard hosting dashboard called cPanel. Well walk through how to set up email at your domain using our favorite shared host, SiteGround. The steps will, however, be very similar for other hosting providers using cPanel.
Start by logging in to SiteGround and heading to My Accounts Information & Settings Access cPanel. Now, click the Email Accounts icon. Fill in the email, password and mailbox quota for the new account, then click the Create Account button at the bottom. Youve now got an email account on your own domain!
There are no domain settings to set up here if your domain is also registered with SiteGround and you havent changed any of the defaults. If youre using a domain registered with any other registrar and pointed at SiteGround, youll need to set the MX records as follows:
- mx10.mailspamprotection.com
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Benefits Of Having A Business Email
Its a basic question. And so is the answer. Using business email, youll make more sales and more connectionspure and simple.
For everyone sending emails in business, there comes a lightbulb moment. You realize professional business email is now a necessity so you can do the following:
Email collaboration tools provide more options when working in teams or groups to:
When your business creates the right first impression with email, customers recognize your company name from your website. A pro email address helps you drive sales, increases trustworthiness, makes teamwork easier, and secures your data.
And thats just for starters.
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Change Your Mail Exchanger Records To Point To Your Domain Name
Getting email into your inbox involves a few moving parts:
- A domain name hosted with a registrar.
- Depending on your approach, your host may be involved.
- Your email provider needs to know about your domain.
On top of this, you may also need to link a Content Delivery Network and an email marketing platform to your email address too.
As we noted, this can become complex. In a nutshell, you need to work with the platform you registered your domain name to, and tell wherever your new email account was created. To do this, youll use MX records.
The ins and outs of this are beyond the scope of this article. Still, you dont need expert knowledge in order to use them.
Before we get into changing your MX records, were offering the same caveat we mentioned earlier. There are a number of approaches you could take, so youll need to discuss any specifics with your registrar and/or host.
Under normal circumstances, weve found a host to be more forthcoming with advice about setting up email, so try there first. Some hosts such as Kinsta even give you quick functionality to change , so its worth carrying out some research.
When it comes to the process, youll find it easier to start with your email account host. For cPanel users with Google accounts, theres a dedicated Google MX Wizard, with three steps to getting set up:
For other email providers, youll want to use the cPanel Zone Editor to work with MX records:
Enable Gmail To Work With Your Custom Domain Email
This option allows you to enjoy all the great features that come with a regular Gmail account while sending emails from your email domain for free. Before you can do this, youll need to first have email hosting from a provider that allows email forwarding . Once youve done that, youll sign up with Gmail, forward the emails to that account, and enable Gmail to send as your custom domain email address.
You can then immediately start using your new, professional email address for your startup, blog, business website, or nonprofit. Without a doubt, this is your best option for setting up a custom domain email address for free. This process may sound complicated, but its really not, and I will walk you through it below, step-by-step.
What if you dont have an email hosting plan? In this case, you can move on to option 2 below, which will cost you a few dollars each month for email hosting, or you can transfer your domain to a web hosting provider that offers free email hosting and lets you forward your emails. I personally recommend Bluehost web hosting since theyre inexpensive and make it really easy to transfer your domain to them from another provider. Once youve done this, you can move on to setting up your custom domain with Gmail as described below.
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Its Neater And More Professional To Have An Email Address On Your Own Domain As We Show You
While you get a lot with a free email account, such as those from Gmail or Microsoft, youre plagued with adverts and you get less choice over your email name. A better way is to register your own domain name and then add an email package to it. This gets you a completely custom email address and lets you expand to add more users or family members, as you want. If youre running a business, it also looks a lot more professional to have a dedicated email address than it does to be using a free one. Here, well show you what the various options are, how you go about setting them up and what the benefits are over a free service.