Business email on your own domain

Business email on your own domain means addresses such as office@yourcompany.com in place of a free webmail address. It looks more trustworthy, the addresses stay under your control when you change providers or staff, and it lets you publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the DNS records that prove your mail is genuine and help keep it out of spam folders. You need a domain, a mail service (often included with web hosting), MX records that point to that service, and those three authentication records.

#Why use your own domain for email

• Trust. Customers expect a company to write from its own domain. A free address on an invoice or a quote makes people hesitate.
• Control. The domain is yours, so if you move to another mail provider, the addresses move with you. With a free account, the provider controls the address.
• Continuity. When someone leaves, their mailbox stays with the company. You can forward it to a colleague instead of losing customer conversations.
• Authentication. You can publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC only on a domain you control. Without them, it is much easier for someone else to send mail that pretends to be from you.

Make sure the domain itself is registered in your company's name. Our guide to domain names explains why that matters and how renewal works.

#Mailboxes, aliases, forwarders and lists

These are four different things, and mixing them up leads to paying for mailboxes you do not need.

• Mailbox: a real account with its own password and storage. Give one to each person.
• Alias: an extra address that delivers into an existing mailbox. sales@ and info@ can both land in one inbox.
• Forwarder: passes incoming mail on to another address, which can be outside your domain.
• Mailing list: one address that sends a message to a group of people, such as team@.

A practical setup is one mailbox per person, plus role addresses such as office@, invoices@ and support@ as aliases or shared mailboxes. Role addresses survive staff changes and can be pointed at someone else in a minute. Avoid sharing one password among several people, because you cannot cleanly take access away from one of them later.

#MX records: how mail finds your server

When someone sends you a message, their mail server looks up the MX records of your domain in DNS. Each MX record names a mail server and a priority, and the sender tries the lowest number first. If your MX records point to your hosting provider, mail is delivered there. If they point to another mail service, mail goes there, even though the website stays where it is.

This means the website and email can live with different providers. The domain's DNS decides where each one goes: A records for the site, MX records for mail. When you change one, leave the other alone unless you mean to move it too.

#SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain words

Email was designed without any proof of who sent a message. These three DNS records add that proof. Large mailbox providers increasingly expect all three, especially from domains that send a lot of mail.

Record	What it says	Where it lives
SPF	Which servers may send mail for this domain	A TXT record on the domain
DKIM	The public key that checks the signature on each message	A TXT record under a selector name
DMARC	What to do with mail that fails the checks, and where to send reports	A TXT record at _dmarc on the domain

SPF is a list of allowed senders. Include every service that sends as your domain: your mail host, your newsletter tool, and your shop or CRM if it sends receipts. A domain should have only one SPF record, so add new services to it instead of creating a second one. SPF also limits how many DNS lookups a record may trigger, so a long chain of includes can break it.

DKIM is a signature. The sending server signs each message with a private key, and the receiving server checks it against the public key in your DNS. It shows that the message was not changed on the way and that your domain approved it. Each sending service gives you its own DKIM record to publish.

DMARC ties the two together. It requires the domain in the visible From address to match a domain that passed SPF or DKIM, and it tells receivers what to do when that fails: only report it (p=none), send the message to spam (p=quarantine) or refuse it (p=reject). Start with p=none and a reporting address, read the reports to find senders you forgot, fix them, and then tighten the policy step by step.

How to stay out of the spam folder

• Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and test them with an online checker after every change.
• Send newsletters and bulk campaigns through a dedicated email service set up with its own SPF and DKIM entries, not from an ordinary mailbox.
• Email only people who asked to hear from you, and put a working unsubscribe link in every marketing message.
• Use a real, consistent From address that can receive replies.
• Avoid link shorteners, attachments nobody expects, and messages that are a single image.
• If mail starts bouncing or landing in spam, check whether your domain or your sending server appears on a public blocklist.

#Webmail or a mail app

Webmail lets you read mail in a browser on any computer, with nothing to install. It is handy when travelling or on a borrowed machine. Most people still prefer a mail app such as Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird or the one on their phone.

Connect apps with IMAP for incoming mail and SMTP with a login for outgoing mail. IMAP keeps messages on the server and syncs folders and read status across devices, so your phone, your laptop and webmail all show the same inbox. The older POP3 protocol downloads messages to one device and often removes them from the server, which suits almost nobody who uses more than one device. Use the encrypted connection settings your provider lists, and keep an eye on mailbox storage, since IMAP keeps everything on the server.

#Moving email to another provider

Email moves cleanly when you work in order:

1. List every mailbox, alias, forwarder and list on the old service, and every system that sends mail as your domain.
2. Lower the TTL on your MX records a day or two ahead, so the change spreads quickly.
3. Create the same mailboxes and aliases at the new provider.
4. Copy existing mail with an IMAP migration tool or the new provider's import feature. Export a local backup first.
5. Switch the MX records, update SPF, and publish the new provider's DKIM record.
6. Keep the old service running for a while and copy over anything that still arrives there.
7. Reconnect every mail app with the new server settings, then close the old accounts.

If you are moving the website at the same time, our guide to moving a website to a new host covers the order of steps for both.

#How PN Scripts can help

PN Scripts Hosting keeps email on the same account as the website. You create mailboxes on your domain, aliases, forwarders and mailing lists from the control panel, and webmail and SMTP are included on every shared plan, with mailing lists from the second plan up. Mailbox counts and mail storage for each plan are listed on the email management page.