Stop quoting from a Gmail address: business email on your own domain

Sending a quotation from a free personal address is not just a presentation problem, though it is that too. It is a control problem, and it becomes obvious at the worst moment.

What the free account actually costs

• The account is not yours. When the person who created yourcompany.sales@example.com leaves, they own the mailbox, the history and the password reset. There is no administrator to transfer it to you.
• You cannot prove you sent it. Anyone can put your company name in the display field of a free account. On your own domain, SPF and DKIM let receiving servers verify the mail really came from you.
• The address advertises somebody else. Every invoice, every signature, every reply carries a third-party brand instead of yours.
• Nothing is centrally recoverable. No shared archive, no aliases, no catch-all, and no way to answer "what did we send that customer in March" after the person has gone.

The move takes an afternoon

1. Decide the addresses first. Personal mailboxes for people, plus shared aliases for roles - sales@, support@, accounts@. Aliases forward into real mailboxes and cost nothing, so create the ones you will hand out on the website.
2. Create the mailboxes on the domain.
3. Import the old mail. Existing mailboxes copy across with their folder structure and history intact - we do this with you rather than leaving you to it.
4. Change the MX records to point mail at the new server. Until this happens nothing arrives; after it, everything does.
5. Forward the old addresses for a few months and reply from the new one, so correspondents update their address books by habit.

The three records that decide whether your mail arrives

This is the part people skip, and it is the reason a new domain's mail lands in spam.

SPF is a DNS record listing which servers are allowed to send as your domain. Include every one that does - your mail host, your website's contact form, your invoicing tool, your newsletter service. A missing entry means that system's mail gets treated as forged.

DKIM signs each outgoing message with a private key and publishes the public key in DNS. It proves the message was not altered in transit and that it genuinely came from your domain. Enable it in the panel; it is a checkbox and a record.

DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when SPF and DKIM fail, and asks them to send you reports. Start at p=none and read the reports for a fortnight - you will discover systems sending as you that you had forgotten about. Once they are all in SPF, move to p=quarantine and then p=reject.

Going straight to reject is how a company stops receiving its own order confirmations. Do it in that order.

Our email plans come with the mailbox import and all three records configured with you on the call. If you are doing it elsewhere, set them anyway - they are not optional any more.