A lot of us are using email addresses like [email protected] or some other names with your gmail account.
They look very unprofessional don’t they?
It is best that you start using your domain specific address like [email protected] This will help build more trust among your clients or the people you are targeting to market a product.
There are a couple of options that you can use to create domain specific email addresses.
You can use G Suite, which is a very popular and powerful app. It used to be free a few years back. Now they have made it into a paid subscription. It costs around $5 / user / month. It is a significant amount for starters and small businesses.
The second option and the one I recommend is Zoho Mail. It’s a very popular company which provides many applications. They provide domain specific email for free.
If you are just starting with freelancing or a small business, this is the best solution to set up your domain specific mail for FREE. This is the best G Suite alternative out there.
Here is a step by step guide on how to set up your domain specific email address on Zoho Mail.
Table of Contents
Setting up your Zoho Mail
To get started with your free business account, signup with business email.
You will be taken to a pricing page where they have different plans
Mail Lite: Rs 59 /User /Month billed annually (5 GB per user)
Mail Premium: Rs 199 /User /Month billed annually (50 GB per user)
You can check out more details of paid plans here.
Once you scroll down, you will see the FOREVER FREE PLAN. Free plan can have upto 5 users and a limit of 5GB/User with a 25MB attachment limit.
Add your domain name with which you would like to create your account with.
In the next page, register with your full name, your new business email address and set a password. You can use any name for your domain specific email address.
I would highly recommend you to enable two factor authentication security for all your email accounts.
For now, you can skip this step and move on. You can do it later on from your dashboard, once you have set up your email account.
Verification Process
If you are using one of these domain providers to manage the DNS, you need to select the service provider where your domain name is registered.
In our case, even though the domain is registered with Namecheap, the DNS record is managed by Cloudflare. Using Cloudflare increases your domain efficiency by a great extent.
You might be interested to read:
How to Setup Free Cloudflare CDN for your website in 5 minutes
If you are using cloudflare, select “Others”.
To provide domain ownership, you need to provide a TXT record in your DNS records list. Copy the TXT value.
Login to Cloudflare and paste the TXT value it in the content area as shown below.
If you are using any other service providers like Bluehost or GoDaddy, the process is going to be the same.
Click Verify by TXT and your domain will now have been verified.
Next, create an account with a username. By default the user who signs up first and sets up the domain becomes the Super Administrator.
You will now have an option to create more users but we will skip this step for mow. You can create up to 5 users with the free account.
To make sure that the email gets sent and received, you need to add MX records at your DNS level.
Copy these values and add them in your DNS records as shown below
Next you need to add SPF records so that your domain email won’t be spammed by the spammer
Next we need to add DKIM records to our DNS records.
Click Add Selector to add a new selector for the domain.
Provide the selector name, for the domain to be used with Zoho Mail. Ex: zoho
Click Save. A text box TXT record Value is displayed with the Public DKIM key value.
You can copy (Right-click >> Copy) the entire text in the TXT record value field.
Paste the entire content you copied from the text field TXT Record Value in Zoho.
Save the TXT record in the DNS Manager (in our case, Cloudflare).
Click Validate on Zoho.
That’s it.
You can check the validity of the DKIM using this third party link
Below you can see that our DKIM record has been validated.
You can see that DKIM has been enabled in the dashboard.
Configuring SPF and DKIM for your domain is very important as it will prevent spammers from email spoofing and backscattering to a certain extent.
So in simple terms,
TXT record is to verify domain ownership and to ensure email security.
MX records or Mail Exchange records are mail servers responsible for accepting email messages on behalf of your domain name
SPF record is used to prevent spammers
DKIM uses Email encryption with public/private keys to make sure that the email send from your Mailing host are not classified as Spam at the recipient end.
Note: Make sure to remove any existing MX or TXT records as it might hinder from sending mails to your Zoho account and you might be marked as a spammer by Gmail.
That’s it guys
Your domain name has been set up.
The good thing about Zoho Mail is that they have a mobile and desktop app so you can access them from anywhere at any time.
You can now login into your email using mail.zoho.in
You can explore through Zoho Mail settings and learn more on how to change your profile picture and all.
If I have missed out anything here or if you have any queries, you can share in the comments section below.
If you liked the guide, share it on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and with your friends so that it will help them too.
Cheers
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