Getting mail at your own domain

An email address at your own domain does more for how seriously you are taken than any design decision you will make. mike@okanaganelectric.ca reads as a business. The same person at a free webmail address reads as a side project, fairly or not.

There are two ways to do it and they cost very differently.

Forwarding: free, and enough for many businesses

Most registrars will forward mail from an address at your domain to an inbox you already have. Mail sent to hello@yourdomain.ca arrives in your existing personal or work inbox. It costs nothing.

The catch is replying. By default your reply goes out from the underlying address, which rather defeats the point. Both Gmail and Outlook let you fix this — "send mail as" in Gmail, using your domain address as an alias — and it takes about ten minutes to set up. Do that, or the forward is only half a solution.

Good for: a business where one person handles all the mail and the volume is modest.

A real mailbox: roughly $8 to $20 a month

Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 give you an actual mailbox at your domain, with calendar, storage, and the ability to have several addresses and several people. Cheaper options exist — Fastmail, Zoho, and most registrars sell mailboxes for a few dollars a month.

Good for: more than one person, or anywhere you need shared calendars, or anywhere losing mail would be serious.

The one technical thing you must not break

Your domain has DNS records, which are the instructions telling the internet where to send things. Two of them matter enormously here:

• MX records say where email for your domain goes.
• SPF records say which servers are allowed to send email as your domain.

Two rules that will save you a very bad week:

1. A domain can have exactly one SPF record. Not two. If you add a second v=spf1 line rather than merging it into the existing one, everything fails SPF and your mail starts landing in spam — including mail that worked yesterday.
2. Adding a second mail system at the root of your domain breaks the first. If your registrar forwards hello@yourdomain.ca and you later verify the same root domain with another mail service, that service publishes its own MX record and the two compete. Mail starts disappearing, and it disappears quietly.

You will meet this again in chapter 10 when the site starts sending you enquiries, and it is the single most common self-inflicted outage we see. The fix is to use a subdomain for anything new — send.yourdomain.ca rather than yourdomain.ca — which has no mail records of its own and cannot interfere.

What to do now

• Decide: forwarding or a mailbox.
• Set it up, and set up "send as" if you chose forwarding.
• Send yourself a test from an outside address, reply to it, and check the reply arrives showing your domain address.