No business email? We will set yours up, free

Why the address changes how you are read

Nobody consciously judges an email address. They just decide, in about a second, how established the sender looks — and a consumer address with a birth year in it does not look established.

It shows up hardest where the money is. A quotation from [email protected] reads like a company with an accounts department. The same quotation from a gmail address reads like one person with a laptop, even when the work behind it is identical.

The other place it shows is trust in the other direction. Buyers have been taught to check the sender before paying an invoice. An address on the same domain as your website is the check passing.

The DNS is the part that actually decides whether your mail arrives

Four records do the work. MX says where mail addressed to your domain should be delivered. SPF lists which servers are allowed to send as you. DKIM signs each message so the receiver can prove it was not altered. DMARC tells the receiver what to do when something fails.

Get these wrong and your mail does not bounce — it quietly lands in spam, which is far worse, because you never find out. You just stop hearing back from people.

SPF has a hard limit of ten DNS lookups, and it is easy to blow past it. On one client zone we found that a single mail include was already consuming five of the ten before any other sender had been added — half the budget gone on one line. Past ten, SPF returns PermError silently and the protection stops working. We check the total, not just whether the record exists.

If you already send from somewhere else — a WooCommerce store, a newsletter tool, a CRM — those senders have to be in the same SPF record. We look at what you actually send from before we write it, rather than pasting in a default and leaving you to discover the gap.

What free actually means here, in full

We are setting you up on Zoho Mail's Forever Free Plan. It is a real product from a real Indian company, not a trial, and it does not expire. What it gives you is up to five users on one domain, 5 GB of mail storage each, and access through webmail and Zoho's own mobile apps.

Here is the honest limit. The free plan does not include IMAP, POP or ActiveSync. That means you cannot connect it to Outlook on your desktop or to the built-in Mail app on your phone — you use the browser or the Zoho app instead. For most small businesses this is a non-issue. If your accountant lives inside Outlook, it is not, and you will need a paid plan for those users. We will tell you which camp you are in before we start, not after.

We set up four mailboxes and leave the fifth slot free, so you can add someone later without paying anyone or moving anything.

And there is no catch on our side either. We do not charge for it, and there is nothing to cancel. It takes us under an hour, it makes everything else we do for a client work better, and it is a straightforward way for people to find out what we are like to deal with before any money changes hands.

What you should not use it for

Do not send newsletters, offers or bulk campaigns from these mailboxes. Not because the plan forbids it, but because campaign mail sent through a normal mailbox damages the reputation of the domain your invoices go out on. One complaint-heavy send and your quotations start landing in spam.

Marketing mail belongs in a tool built for it, on its own sending setup — Brevo, Mailchimp, Klaviyo, whichever suits. Keep staff mail and campaign mail separate. We have seen a store break its own order confirmations by mixing the two.

If you want the marketing side set up as well, that is ordinary paid work and we will quote it. It is not part of this.