Custom Email

What custom email is

It is an email address on your own domain: name@yourbrand.com. The same domain your website runs on. The mailbox works like any other, except it carries your name instead of gmail.com.

You will also see it called a business email or simply email for business. Same thing: a mailbox tied to your domain rather than to a free service.

Who actually needs this

Not everyone equally. If clients come through referrals and word of mouth, gmail will not scare anyone off.

Cold outreach is different. In tenders and commercial proposals the address affects whether your message gets opened at all.

The most common case we see: a team of several people, each writing from a personal address. The client cannot tell whether this is a company or a few freelancers.

Gmail or email on your own domain

When you work alone, a free mailbox is usually enough. Things get harder once there is a team.

A gmail.com address belongs to the person who created it. A sales manager leaves and takes every client conversation with them, while clients keep writing to the old address for months. That does not happen with an address on your domain: you can hand the mailbox to the next person or redirect the mail to a colleague. Getting back into a Gmail account that belonged to a former employee is close to impossible, even if it was used for company business for years.

Then there is trust. A message from anna.sales.2024@gmail.com is easy to mistake for a scam, especially when it contains an invoice or bank details. An address on the company domain is something the client can check: open your website and see the same name.

Gmail is perfectly fine for personal things. For client work it is better when the address belongs to the company and not to one employee.

What the setup includes

Creating an address is half the job. Then comes business email hosting proper: MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. A mailbox for everyone on the team. A delivery check.

That last step gets skipped most often. A domain without SPF and DKIM looks suspicious to Gmail, and part of your mail lands in spam. The client assumes you simply never replied.

To create business email we need your domain and the addresses you want. We handle the rest, and administration stays on our side.

Why MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC matter

The acronyms sound scary, but each one answers a single simple question. Mail services ask your domain these questions before they accept a message.

• MX tells the world which server should receive mail for your domain. Without it, incoming email never reaches you.
• SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail in your name. A message that comes from anywhere else looks forged.
• DKIM puts a digital signature on every message, so the recipient can see nobody changed the text on the way.
• DMARC tells mail services what to do with a message that fails the SPF or DKIM check: accept it, send it to spam or reject it.

Large mail providers check these records more strictly every year. So we set up all four from the start, even if right now you only send a few emails a week.

How to name addresses for a team

People read addresses out over the phone, print them on business cards and type them from memory. So keep them short and easy to understand by ear.

• Pick one pattern for everyone. First name only (anna@), first and last name with a dot (anna.koval@) or initials all work, as long as everyone follows the same rule. When each person invents their own, clients get confused.
• Add shared addresses for specific jobs: info@ for enquiries, sales@ for sales, hello@ for the website form. They are not tied to one person, so staff changes do not affect them.
• Avoid digits, hyphens and letters that are hard to spell out loud. Names from other alphabets get transliterated in different ways, so agree on one spelling. Also check how the address looks in writing: l and 1, O and 0 are easy to mix up.
• Watch the length. If an address takes more than a few seconds to say, someone will mistype it sooner or later.

There are almost no limits on the name itself. It can be a first name, a nickname, a word from your brand or something completely unexpected. The examples in the card above show how different addresses can be.

What to prepare before we start

Setup goes faster when a few questions are answered in advance.

1. Your domain name and access to the registrar account. If someone else registered the domain years ago, find out who. Without DNS access, email cannot be set up.
2. A list of addresses. Who on the team gets a personal mailbox, and which addresses will be shared.
3. Old addresses that need forwarding for the first few weeks.
4. The devices you will read mail on: phone, laptop, tablet. The mailbox works with any email client, and knowing your devices helps us take them into account when connecting everything.

If you already have email

We can set up forwarding so everything lands in one inbox at first and you miss nothing while you get used to the new address.

If the domain already runs your website, we add the mail records so the site does not break. These are different record types and they do not conflict, but the order of operations matters.

How to check that your email works

After launch, it is worth spending ten minutes on a simple check. You do not need any technical knowledge for it.

1. Send a message from the new address to your personal Gmail inbox. See whether it lands in the Inbox or in spam.
2. Open that message and find "Show original" in the menu. Gmail will show the results of the SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks. Each one should say PASS.
3. Reply to it from Gmail and make sure the reply reaches the new mailbox.
4. Ask someone to write to you from a different mail service, Outlook for example. Different services check mail in different ways.

If something looks wrong, write to us and attach a screenshot. Most often the cause is a single DNS record.

One more small thing people forget is the signature. Add a link to your website and a phone number, so the client recognises the company faster and knows how to reach you.

Mistakes that send your mail to spam

Most problems with domain email do not show up on launch day. They surface weeks or months later, when a client says they never got your reply.

• Two SPF records instead of one. This happens when a new service is added on top of an old one. A domain can only have one such record, and with two the check fails.
• Moving the website to another host together with DNS. The new company copies the records for the site, and the mail records get lost. Incoming mail stops arriving, and nobody notices right away.
• An expired domain. If the registration is not renewed in time, email stops along with the website.
• Bulk mailings from a work address. When hundreds of promotional emails go out from the same mailbox, mail services start to distrust the whole domain, including your normal correspondence.
• A domain registered to a former contractor or employee. Nobody thinks about it while things work. Then it turns out the only person who can change the records is someone you lost touch with long ago.

We take part of this risk on ourselves, because administration stays on our side. Still, it is best to have the domain registered in your own name and to know where the access details are kept.

What happens after launch

You get the addresses and passwords and connect the mailboxes on your devices. From then on email works like any other: you write to clients, we keep an eye on the settings.

Teams change, and email changes with them. A new hire needs their own mailbox, which is paid for as one more address. When someone leaves, their mailbox can go to a colleague or be forwarded, so no client is left without an answer.

If you are still planning a website, it is convenient to order email together with it. Then some addresses come as a gift, and how many depends on the package. The price card has the details.

How long it takes

Setup takes about three days if you already have a domain. If you do not, we will help you pick and register one. The registrar fee is paid separately and is not part of our price.

The monthly fee is per address, and email hosting is included in it. Three mailboxes for a team means three addresses and three payments. We do not charge a separate setup fee.