How to get a business email address with your own domain

If you're sending quotes from a Gmail address with your birth year in it, you already know it doesn't look great. You've probably been meaning to sort it for a while. The good news is it costs less than a takeaway a month, and it's an afternoon's work once you know which bits you actually need.

Here's the whole thing, in the order you'd do it.

The short answer

You need two things: a domain name and a mailbox provider.

• A domain, such as yourbusiness.co.uk. About £10 to £20 a year.
• A mailbox provider to run the email on it. Anywhere from about £1 to £6 a month per person, depending on who you pick.

Then you connect the two by adding a few settings to your domain. That's the bit people get stuck on, and it's the bit that decides whether your emails reach the inbox or the spam folder.

Domain, hosting and email are three separate things

This trips almost everyone up, because they're often sold as one bundle. Your domain is the name. Hosting is where your website lives. Email is where your mailboxes live. You can have email on your domain without a website at all, and you can move each one without touching the others. I've covered the website side in what is website hosting.

For email, the only thing that really matters is that you own the domain and can change its settings.

Choosing the domain

.co.uk, .uk or .com?

If you trade in the UK and your customers are in the UK, .co.uk is still the safe choice. People recognise it, trust it and type it correctly. A .com is fine too, and worth grabbing if it's free, but it doesn't help you locally. Plain .uk is shorter but less familiar, and people tend to add the 'co' out of habit.

If you can, buy the .co.uk and the .com and point one at the other. It's the price of a couple of coffees a year and it stops anyone else taking it.

Keep it short and easy to say out loud

You'll be reading this address down the phone for years. smithjoinery.co.uk beats smiths-bespoke-joinery-solutions.co.uk every time. Avoid hyphens if you can, and say it out loud to someone before you buy it.

Register it in your own name

This is the one I'll keep repeating. The domain should be registered to you, on your card, with your email as the contact. Not your web designer's, not your nephew's. Whoever controls the domain controls your email. If they disappear, so does every message sent to your business.

Choosing a mailbox provider

There are four sensible options for a small business. None of them is wrong. It comes down to how many people need an address and how you already work.

Google Workspace

Gmail, but on your own domain. If you already use Gmail and like it, this is the easy choice, and it comes with Drive, Calendar and Meet. Expect around £6 a person a month on an annual plan, plus VAT, and a bit more if you pay month to month.

Microsoft 365

Outlook on your own domain. The better fit if you live in Word and Excel, or your clients send you Office files all day. Business Basic is about £5.40 a person a month on an annual plan, plus VAT. Microsoft put its prices up this summer, so check the current figure before you sign up.

iCloud+ with a custom domain

If you're a sole trader on an iPhone, this is the cheapest decent option going. Any iCloud+ plan, from 99p a month, lets you use your own domain for email in the Mail app. It's what I use for hi@bennydunks.uk. When I moved it over, Apple's setup connected to my domain registrar and added the settings for me.

The catch is that it hangs off your personal Apple account. There are no admin tools and no proper way to add staff. Brilliant for a one person band. Not for a team of five.

The mailbox that came with your hosting

Lots of hosting and domain companies throw in a mailbox or two. It works, and it can be free. But the webmail is usually clunky, the spam filtering is weaker, and it ties your email to that company, so moving host later means moving email too. Fine to start with. Most people outgrow it.

What I'd pick

• Just you, on an iPhone: iCloud+.
• Just you, already living in Gmail: Google Workspace.
• A small team, or clients who send you Office files: Microsoft 365.
• Anyone with staff: Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Don't build a business on a personal account.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Buy the domain

From any reputable registrar. Check the renewal price, not just the first year price, and switch on auto renew while you're there.

2. Sign up with your mailbox provider

Pick the provider and choose your address. It will ask you to prove you own the domain, which usually means adding one setting at your registrar.

3. Point your email at the provider

This is a setting called an MX record. It tells the rest of the internet where to deliver mail for your domain. Your provider gives you the exact values. Copy them into your registrar exactly as given.

4. Add the settings that keep you out of spam

SPF, DKIM and DMARC. They get their own section below. Don't skip them.

5. Test it

Send an email to a friend on Gmail and another on Outlook or Hotmail. Check it lands in the inbox, not spam. Then ask them to reply, so you know mail is reaching you too.

6. Change your address everywhere

Your website, your Google Business Profile, invoices, your email signature, the van. If you're moving from an old address, keep it running and forwarding for a few months so nothing goes missing.

Why your emails end up in spam

This is the bit almost every do it yourself setup gets wrong. I get asked to fix business email far more often than I get asked to set it up.

Email was never designed to prove who sent it. Anyone can put any address in the 'from' line. So the big inbox providers check three settings on your domain before they trust a message claiming to be from you:

• SPF: a list of the services allowed to send email for your domain.
• DKIM: a digital signature on each email, proving it wasn't tampered with on the way.
• DMARC: instructions for what to do with mail that fails the other two, and where to send reports.

Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo have been much stricter with mail that can't pass these checks. A business sending quotes without them is gambling on every message. Your provider will give you the values for all three. Add them, then test again.

One thing to watch. If you send email from anywhere else too, like an invoicing tool, a booking system or a newsletter service, those need adding to SPF and usually need their own DKIM setup. Otherwise they're the emails that quietly vanish.

Mistakes that cost people

• The domain registered in someone else's name, usually a former web designer. Getting it back can take weeks, if it happens at all.
• Letting the domain lapse. An electrician I spoke to recently let his expire and has been back on a Gmail address ever since. Turn on auto renew and keep the card details up to date.
• Forwarding everything to a free Gmail and replying 'as' your business address. It works, right up until your replies start landing in spam because they fail the checks above.
• Using info@ for everything. Fine as a catch-all, but people reply more readily to a person. A name feels like a conversation. info@ feels like a queue.
• Three people sharing one login. A mailbox each costs a few pounds a month and saves a lot of confusion.
• Never testing. Most of the broken setups I see were done once, years ago, and nobody has checked since.

Want it done for you?

If you'd rather not touch any of this, I set up domains and business email from £145, fixed price, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC done properly and everything written down so you know what's what. You own the domain and every account. The details are on the domains and email page and the price is on the pricing page.

Already got an address and not sure your emails are landing? Send me the domain and I'll tell you what's missing. Ring me on 07516 124501 or drop me a message.