How to set up business email on your own domain: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or free forwarding

An address at your own domain is one of the first things a new business should set up, and one of the cheapest. It tells clients the company is real, it keeps work mail out of your personal inbox, and it means the address stays with the business when people come and go. The accounts you sign up for in the first month, from the bank to the payment processor, will all hang off it.

There are three ways to get one. You can pay for a full mailbox from Google or Microsoft, use a free mailbox from a smaller provider, or forward mail for your domain to an inbox you already have. This guide compares them on cost and on what each can actually do, explains the DNS records every route needs, and covers a Gmail change that ends the most common free setup in January 2027.

The three routes, side by side

The real difference is in the last two columns. A mailbox lets you send as your domain properly, with your provider signing each message. Forwarding only receives. Whatever you send back has to come from somewhere else.

Google Workspace

Google's business plans are priced per user. On the annual plan, Business Starter is $7 a user a month, Business Standard is $14 and Business Plus is $22. The Flexible plan, which you can cancel any month, costs $8.40, $16.80 and $26.40.^⁠[1]

Starter is enough for most new companies. You get Gmail on your domain, the calendar, Drive and the document editors, and you can add aliases such as hello@ or billing@ to a user without paying for another seat. If you already live in Gmail, nothing about the daily routine changes.

Microsoft 365

Microsoft raised its business prices on July 1, 2026. Business Basic went from $6 to $7 a user a month, Business Standard from $12.50 to $14, and Business Premium stayed at $22. Existing customers move to the new price at their next renewal.^⁠[2]

Business Basic covers email on your domain in Outlook, Teams, and the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Business Standard adds the desktop apps. If your clients, lawyer or accountant send you Word and Excel files with tracked changes and macros, Microsoft is the safer choice, since nothing gets lost in conversion.

Zoho Mail's free plan

Zoho Mail's Forever Free plan covers up to five users, 5GB of mail storage each and one domain. It doesn't include IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, so you read and send through Zoho's own web and mobile apps rather than Apple Mail or Outlook.^⁠[3] Zoho also notes the plan is available only in some of its data centers, so check that it's offered where you sign up.

For a solo founder, that trade is reasonable. You get a real mailbox that signs your mail correctly, at no cost, and you can move to a paid plan or another provider later. The limit to watch is the app restriction. If you want your work mail in the same app as everything else, you'll outgrow it.

Forwarding only

A forwarding service accepts mail for your domain and passes it on to an inbox you already have. Cloudflare Email Routing is free on every Cloudflare plan, and it only handles incoming mail.^⁠[4] You can create up to 200 routing rules per domain and up to 200 verified destination addresses per account, and it rejects messages larger than 25 MiB.^⁠[5]

There's one catch before you start. Email Routing needs your domain's DNS to be on Cloudflare, and turning it on adds Cloudflare's MX records along with an SPF and a DKIM record to your domain.^⁠[6] If you register a domain elsewhere and keep its DNS there, you'll need to move the DNS first or use your registrar's own forwarding.

Forwarding fits addresses that mostly receive. A contact address on a new website, an address you give to suppliers, or the address a domain registrar sends renewal notices to can all forward safely. It doesn't fit an address you need to reply from every day.

The Gmail change that ends the free workaround

For years, the standard free setup was to forward your domain's mail to a personal Gmail account, then use Gmail's "Send mail as" setting to reply from the business address. That route is closing.

Gmail's help center says that from January 2027 it will no longer support Send as for third-party, non-Google email accounts. Gmailify and fetching mail from other accounts with POP end at the same time, and Gmail may already restrict new setups during the transition in the second half of 2026. Send as keeps working for Google-hosted addresses, which means other Gmail addresses and aliases on a Google Workspace account.^⁠[7]

A forwarded address on your own domain is a third-party address as far as Gmail is concerned. So a forwarding setup started today should plan for replies to come from a real mailbox by the end of the year. Google's own suggestion for a custom domain is Google Workspace. The other options are a mail app that connects to your provider over IMAP and SMTP, or your mail provider's own app.

Cloudflare also sells outbound sending, but it's a different product. Its Email Sending service is in beta, needs the paid Workers plan and is built for transactional mail from code, such as receipts and password resets.^⁠[10] It isn't a mailbox for writing to clients.

The DNS records every route needs

Whichever route you choose, a handful of DNS records decide whether your mail arrives and whether anyone can send mail pretending to be you. Your provider shows the exact values to paste in. Here is what each one does:

• MX tells the world which servers accept mail for your domain. Point them only at your current provider and delete any left over from an earlier one.
• SPF is a TXT record that lists the services allowed to send as your domain. A domain must have only one, and an SPF check may follow at most 10 DNS lookups, so each new tool you add goes into the same record rather than a new one.^⁠[9]
• DKIM publishes a public key so receivers can check that a message was signed by your provider and not changed on the way.
• DMARC is a TXT record at _dmarc that tells receivers what to do with mail that fails both checks, and where to send reports. Start with a policy of none, read the reports, and tighten it once everything legitimate passes.

Google requires every sender to Gmail accounts to use SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail must use SPF, DKIM and DMARC, with the From address aligned to one of them, and keep spam complaints below 0.3%.^⁠[8] A new company sends far fewer, but setting up all three now means a newsletter or a product launch later won't need emergency DNS work.

Our cold email domain setup guide covers each record in detail. If you plan to send cold email, do it from a separate domain so a bad week of outreach can't damage the address your customers write to.

Setting it up

The order matters more than the provider. Done in this sequence, nobody misses a message while you switch.

• Sign up and verify the domain. Every provider asks you to add a TXT record that proves you own it. Nothing changes for incoming mail yet.
• Create the users and aliases. Decide which addresses are people and which are shared, such as hello@ and invoices@, before anyone starts using them.
• Switch the MX records. This is the moment mail starts arriving at the new provider. Lower the records' TTL a day earlier so the change spreads quickly.
• Add SPF and turn on DKIM. DKIM usually means generating a key in the provider's admin panel, then publishing it as a TXT record.
• Add DMARC at none. Point its reports at an address someone reads, or at a free report viewer.
• Test it. Send to and from a Gmail and an Outlook address, then open the message headers and check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass.

Then use the new address everywhere that matters. Move the business bank, the payment processor, the domain registrar and your accounting software off your personal email, so the company's accounts don't depend on one person's inbox.

Mistakes worth avoiding

• Two SPF records. Adding a second TXT record that starts with v=spf1 for a new tool breaks SPF for both. Merge them into one.
• Old MX records left in place. Mail then lands at random in the old provider and the new one.
• Company accounts on a personal address. The day that person leaves, password resets go to the wrong place.
• A paid seat for every shared address. On Workspace and Microsoft 365, shared addresses can be aliases or groups at no extra cost.
• Skipping DMARC. Without it, anyone can send mail that claims to be from your domain, and receivers have no instruction on what to do with it.

Moving later

Switching providers is mostly a weekend's work for a small team. Each provider offers tools to import old mail. The DNS steps above are the same in reverse, and the main risk is a gap while MX records change, which a low TTL keeps short. What's harder to move are the documents, calendars and shared drives, so the bigger decision is the office suite, not the mailbox.

Which one should you pick?

• Pick Google Workspace if your team works in Gmail, Docs and Sheets, or if you want to keep using Gmail's Send as with aliases after January 2027.
• Pick Microsoft 365 if your clients and advisers work in Word and Excel, or if you already use Teams.
• Pick Zoho Mail's free plan if you're alone, need a real mailbox and are happy to use Zoho's apps.
• Use forwarding for addresses that only receive, and pair it with a real mailbox before you need to reply from them.

Email is the first piece of a small set of tools every new business runs on. Our guide to the startup tech stack covers the rest, in the order you'll need them, and our guide to what a startup website needs covers the site that address will sit on.