Why your business email should use your own domain

An email from hello@yourbusiness.co.uk tells a customer they’re dealing with a real business. An email from a free webmail address could be from anyone.

That’s the short answer: email at your own domain looks more trustworthy, puts your name in front of customers and, most important of all, belongs to your business. When staff leave or you change provider, the addresses stay yours.

Setting it up takes a domain, some email hosting and a little care with three security settings. Here’s what’s involved, and how to move your existing email across.

Why your own domain beats free webmail

Customers trust it

Anyone can open a free email account in minutes and put any name they like on it, including yours. So a free address can make a genuine business look less established, and it makes it harder for customers to tell you apart from someone pretending to be you.

It keeps your name in front of people

Every email you send carries your business name and web address. Over months and years, that’s a lot of reminders of who you are and where to find you.

You stay in control when people leave

When staff use personal accounts for work, customer conversations end up in mailboxes the business doesn’t control. With your own domain, the business creates the mailboxes. When someone leaves, you can keep their messages, send their address on to a colleague and close their account.

You keep your addresses if you change provider

Your domain is yours, wherever your email is hosted. If you move to a new email provider, you set up the same addresses there and point your domain at them. An address at a free webmail service, or one that came with your broadband, is tied to that provider.

What you need to get started

• A domain name. The yourbusiness.co.uk part. If you haven’t got one yet, our guide to choosing a domain name will help.
• Email hosting. The service that stores your mail and sends and receives it. It often comes with web hosting, but you don’t need a website to use it. Check it works with the apps your team already uses, such as Outlook or the mail app on their phones.
• Mailboxes. One for each person who needs their own inbox.
• Forwarders, also called aliases. Extra addresses, like sales@ or info@, that deliver to an existing mailbox, so one person can look after several addresses.
• Autoresponders and mailing lists, if you want them: automatic replies for when you’re away, and one address that reaches a whole group.

Every VoIPTech hosting plan includes business email, with 5 mailboxes on Basic, 50 on Plus and unlimited on Premium, plus unlimited forwarders, autoresponders and mailing lists on all three.

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC

These three settings show other mail servers that email from your domain really comes from you. Without them, it’s easier for criminals to send email that appears to come from your domain (known as spoofing), for example to send your customers a fake invoice. Your genuine email is also more likely to land in spam.

All three are records you add to your domain’s DNS, the settings that tell the internet where your website and email live. Your email host should tell you what to add.

• SPF (Sender Policy Framework) lists the servers allowed to send email for your domain, so receiving servers can spot mail sent from anywhere else.
• DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) adds a digital signature to every email you send. The receiving server checks it against a key published in your DNS, which shows the message came from your domain and wasn’t changed on the way.
• DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) tells receiving servers what to do with email that fails those checks: deliver it as normal (‘none’), treat it as suspicious, usually by sending it to spam (‘quarantine’), or refuse it (‘reject’). It also asks them to send you reports, so you can see what’s sending email in your name.

The NCSC, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, sets out the steps in its guidance on email security and anti-spoofing. Its advice is to start DMARC on ‘none’, which only reports and doesn’t affect delivery, then move to at least ‘quarantine’ once the reports show your genuine email passing.

It matters for getting your email delivered too. Gmail’s sender guidelines require everyone who sends email to Gmail accounts to set up SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to set up all three.

Don’t forget the domains you don’t use for email. The NCSC says all your domains should have a DMARC record, including parked domains, whether or not you send email from them. Our guide to cyber security basics covers the other steps worth taking.

How to move your existing email across

Moving from a free address, or from another provider, is straightforward if you take it in order.

1. Set up the new mailboxes first, so they’re ready before any mail arrives.
2. Copy your old messages across. Many email apps can hold the old and new accounts side by side, so you can drag folders from one to the other, and some providers offer a migration tool.
3. Point your domain’s email at the new provider. This means setting its MX records, the DNS records that tell other servers where to deliver your email. Changes can take a while to reach everywhere, so pick a quiet time.
4. Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the new provider, as above.
5. Keep the old account open for a while. If it can forward new mail automatically, turn that on. If not, set an automatic reply that gives people your new address.
6. Update everywhere your address appears: your website, email signatures, invoices, business cards, online listings and your accounts with suppliers.

The short version

Email at your own domain looks more professional, makes it harder for anyone to pretend to be you once SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place, and stays with your business whatever changes. Business email comes with all our hosting plans, from £2.99 per month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Still need a domain? Search for yours.