Business email on Gmail, or mail landing in spam? Proper email on your own domain

Your quotations go out from a free Gmail or Yahoo address, and a buyer asks whether you are a registered company. Or you do have an address like [email protected], set up with your hosting long ago, but customers keep saying your emails reached their spam folder, if they arrived at all. Either way, email is costing you trust and sometimes orders.

The fix has two parts: put your email on your own domain with a reliable provider, and publish the few DNS records that tell other mail servers your messages are genuine.

Why your own domain matters

• Trust. An address on your company's domain looks like a business, not a personal account.
• Ownership. When a staff member leaves, the mailbox and its history stay with the business.
• Consistency. Everyone uses the same format, and your website, invoices and visiting cards match.

Where your mailboxes can live

• Email included with web hosting. It can work for light use, but on shared servers your mail can be affected by other users' behaviour, and help with delivery problems is often limited.
• A dedicated business email service, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. These are built for email and calendars, with good spam filtering and mobile apps, and are what I usually suggest for a business that depends on email.

Whichever you choose, the domain stays yours; only the mailbox provider changes.

The records that keep you out of spam

Receiving servers decide whether to trust your mail partly by checking records in your domain's DNS:

• MX tells the world which service receives mail for your domain.
• SPF lists the services allowed to send mail as your domain. Keep only one SPF record, and make sure it includes everything that sends for you: your mailbox provider, your website's contact form, your invoicing or accounting tool, and any newsletter service.
• DKIM adds a digital signature to each message, which receiving servers check against a key published in your DNS.
• DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and sends you reports. Start with a monitoring-only policy, read the reports, then tighten it once all your genuine mail passes.

Large mailbox providers such as Gmail increasingly expect these records, especially from senders who send a lot of mail.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Decide your addresses: shared ones such as info and sales, and named ones for staff.
2. Choose a provider and create the mailboxes.
3. At a quiet time, change the MX records at your DNS host so new mail flows to the new service.
4. Add the SPF record, switch on DKIM in your provider and publish its record, then add DMARC.
5. Set your website's forms to send through an authenticated mailbox rather than the server's default mail function.
6. Move old mail across if you need it, and set up phones and laptops.
7. Send a test to a Gmail account, open the message, choose "Show original", and check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC all show PASS.

Habits and mistakes

• Do not send bulk promotional email from your everyday mailbox; use a proper sending service. For outreach, see cold email deliverability.
• Avoid emails that are a single large image or full of shortened links.
• Turn on two-step verification for every mailbox, and when someone leaves, suspend or reassign their mailbox rather than deleting it straight away.
• Two separate SPF records on one domain can make SPF checks fail.
• Forgetting the website or invoicing tool in SPF means those messages fail checks.
• Setting DMARC to reject on day one can block your own genuine mail.

What you can do and where help is needed

You can decide the addresses, choose a provider and list every tool that sends email for you. DNS changes, DKIM and DMARC, form settings and moving old mail are worth having done carefully, as part of website and software development work, because one wrong record can stop your mail.

The smallest useful first step

Send an email from your current business address to a Gmail account, open "Show original" and look at the SPF, DKIM and DMARC results. That one check tells you where you stand. If anything fails and you want it fixed, get in touch.