Best (free) way to to get an email address @ your own domain name?

March 16th, 2015

I want to create email addresses for our founder team that are "@" our own domain name (rather than @gmail.com for instance). Our domain hosting service has a paid option to do this, but I feel like it can be set up for free.

Eric Levenson

March 16th, 2015

if you set up with google domains they will do it for free and then forward to a gmail address.

David Glauber

March 16th, 2015

zoho is currently the only company to allow free custom domain email.
They give up to 10 accounts of up to 5GB mailbox on their free plan

Randy Martinez Founder/CEO at Incendiary Games

March 16th, 2015

I use Google Apps, and it is worth it for me for $5/mo/user to have the peace of mind, reliability, and performance of gmail.

David Schwartz Multi-Platform (Desktop+Mobile) Rapid Prototyping + Dev, Tool Dev

March 16th, 2015

You get what you pay for. Free hosting comes at a price -- mostly unwanted ads, lack of control of various options, and their right to snoop through your mail content and use it for their own purposes. You require people to sign an NDA before telling them about your stuff, right? So why would you want to set up an email account somewhere that says you get it for free by allowing them to have nonexclusive right to access your email??? This kind of attitude totally baffles me! Here you are setting up a business and you basically want to set up a key part of your service in somebody else's garage and trust that they have your best interests at heart. Really?

You get domain names from registrars, and virtually all registrars today offer some kind of hosting. It's not free, but it's pretty damn cheap.

Here's a link to get a 55% discount off of the first month's hosting at Hostgator:

hostgator.com/?utm_source=utopia&utm_medium=promoemail&utm_campaign=host_HG_March_Promo_2015

Get a cPanel hosting account. Even GoDaddy offers them now! NameCheap does, too.

Most email clients allow you to configure them for external email hosting, and cPanel lets you set up both POP3 and IMAP. These accounts also give you web hosting.

This is a great way to get started. You can start out small on a shared server, and expand your resources as needed, to the point where you can get a dedicated host if needed. cPanel makes it really easy to migrate accounts from one server to another, so you not tied down. Just don't expect to migrate a free hosting account any where, because they don't want you to leave.

Stephen Packer Lead Developer at Lettuce Box LLC

March 16th, 2015

NameCheap is a domain name registrar (where you can buy your domain name). If you buy (or transfer) your domain with them, they offer free email forwarding, so you can forward <anything>@<your-domain>.com to your gmail.

Other domain name registrars may also offer this service; I just don't have the experience to recommend others.

Your personal Gmail account can then add that email as an alias (under Settings > Account > Send Mail As), and can be configured to automatically reply as that address if the email came in as that address, or send a new email as that address.

My personal affiliate link to NameCheap:

http://www.namecheap.com/?aff=13137

Non-affiliated URL:

http://www.namecheap.com/

Danny Sung

March 17th, 2015

Not a free option, but web hosting services are often very cheap and offer unlimited emails and unlimited storage... (FYI you aren't required to use the web part of their service if you don't want). I've used Bluehost, which has an unlimited plan for $7/mo or $84/year. Alternatively, if you're worried about spam, you can add on their spam filtering service for an added charge. Or Rackspace offers a business mail solution that's rather compelling ($2/user/month).

If you have some technical capability, you can always setup your own imap server on a cheap VPS (like Digital Ocean if performance is of concern or BudgetVM if you want more storage for your buck) for about $5/mo.

Samik Raychaudhuri

March 16th, 2015

Depends on what type of domain service you are choosing, but many shared domain hosting services give this for free. The one I use [http://www.directadminhosting.com/] does that, and so does quite a few others.

Hans Erickson Entrepreneur

March 16th, 2015

Google used to allow free sign ups for small business, but no more. I am not aware of other free options, but may be bundled with web hosting or other services.

David Fridley Founder at Synaccord

March 16th, 2015

I also use zoho, it works well for me.

Alison Reyes Founder and CEO at Dezignable

March 18th, 2015

We've been using zoho mail for about 6 months now with no problems. Easy to set up and I don't find the spam filtering to be bad at all. I'd recommend it until you decide to change to a paid service later. And - it's great to have it separated from your hosting provider. more control for you.

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