Many small businesses still write to customers from free addresses like [email protected]. It's convenient at first, but problems appear as the company grows. Email on your own domain — [email protected], [email protected] — makes a difference in both trust and control.
The advantages of corporate email
- Trust. Customers, banks and partners take an email from a company domain seriously. Offers from free addresses, on the other hand, are often mistaken for scams.
- The addresses belong to the company. When an employee leaves, their correspondence and customer contacts stay with the company — you just hand the mailbox to someone else or change the password.
- Role addresses. Addresses like sales@, accounts@ and support@ don't depend on one person and can forward to several people.
- Brand. Every email you send repeats your company name and website.
What are the options?
Corporate email needs a domain, and the mailboxes themselves can live in several places:
- Email on your hosting server. A simple solution for small companies that need a few mailboxes.
- Yandex 360, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365. Large mailboxes, convenient mobile apps, calendar and document tools. Usually paid monthly per user; check the terms and prices on each service's own website.
The choice depends on how many mailboxes you need, how much mail you keep and which tools your team works with.
Without proper setup, emails land in spam
Opening corporate email is only half the job. For your emails to reach recipients, several records in the domain's DNS must be correct:
- MX — says which server incoming mail should be delivered to;
- SPF — lists which servers may send mail on behalf of the domain;
- DKIM — confirms with a digital signature that the message wasn't changed in transit;
- DMARC — says what to do with messages that fail the checks.
If one of these records is missing or wrong, Gmail and Outlook send your emails to spam. More: What SPF, DKIM and DMARC are.
What to watch when switching
- List the addresses you'll need in advance.
- For a while, set up automatic forwarding from the old free address to the new one so customers' emails aren't lost.
- Update the address on your website, business cards, social media and Google Business Profile.
- Connect the new mailbox to the email apps on your phone and computer.
How we help
The DNS for our hosting clients' domains is managed in Cloudflare — we set up the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records correctly for you and check that your emails arrive. Write to support from your account — we'll choose the right email solution for you together.
