Business Email on Your Own Domain: Setup, SPF, DKIM, DMARC

An address like [email protected] looks more trustworthy than a free webmail address, and it keeps your business mail under your own name if you ever change provider. Setting it up takes less time than most people expect. This guide covers choosing a provider and mailbox sizes, the DNS records that make email work and get delivered, and connecting your devices.

Why use email on your own domain

• Credibility. Customers and suppliers take a company address more seriously.
• Ownership. The domain is yours. You can move mailboxes to another provider and keep every address.
• Control. Create addresses for new staff, set up aliases such as invoices@ or support@, and close accounts when someone leaves.
• Deliverability. With SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, receiving servers can verify your mail is genuine.

Step 1: decide where your mailboxes live

You have two common options:

• Mailboxes included with web hosting. Many hosting plans include a number of email accounts. This suits small teams who want one bill.
• Dedicated email hosting. Mailboxes bought on their own, priced per mailbox. This suits teams that need more storage, want email separate from the website, or host the website elsewhere.

How much storage does a mailbox need?

It depends on how people work. As a rough guide:

• Light use, mostly text email with occasional attachments: a 10 GB mailbox lasts a long time.
• Everyday office use with regular PDFs, spreadsheets and images: 50 GB gives comfortable headroom.
• Heavy use, such as designers, sales teams sending large files, or anyone who never deletes anything: 250 GB.

You do not have to give everyone the same size. Mixing sizes on one domain is usually the most cost-effective approach.

Step 2: create the mailboxes

In your control panel, create each mailbox with a strong, unique password. Then add aliases and forwarding for shared addresses so you do not pay for mailboxes nobody logs into. For example, info@ can forward to two people. Our guide to aliases and forwarding shows how.

Step 3: add the DNS records

DNS records tell the rest of the internet where to deliver your mail and how to check that mail claiming to be from you is genuine. If your host manages your DNS, most of these may be created for you. If you run your own DNS, add them yourself.

MX records: where mail is delivered

The MX record names the server that receives email for your domain. Without it, nothing arrives. If you use Cloudflare, the mail server's record must be set to DNS only, because email cannot pass through Cloudflare's web proxy.

SPF: who may send for your domain

SPF is a TXT record listing the servers allowed to send mail using your domain. Receiving servers compare the sending server against that list. Two rules matter:

• Have only one SPF record per domain. If you use several sending services, such as your mail host and a newsletter tool, combine them into one record.
• End it with ~all (soft fail) while you are setting up, so legitimate mail is not rejected if you missed a sender.

DKIM: a signature on every message

DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to each outgoing message. The public key is published in a DNS TXT record, and receiving servers use it to check that the message was really sent by your server and was not changed on the way. Your mail server generates the key. You publish it in DNS.

DMARC: what to do when checks fail

DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM, and where to send reports. Start gently:

1. Begin with a policy of p=none, which only collects reports.
2. Read the reports for a few weeks to find any legitimate senders you forgot.
3. Move to p=quarantine, then p=reject once you are confident.

Our article on SPF, DKIM and DMARC has example records.

Step 4: connect your devices

Business mailboxes that use the standard IMAP and SMTP protocols work with almost every mail app:

• Outlook on Windows and Mac.
• Apple Mail on Mac, iPhone and iPad.
• Thunderbird and the built-in mail app on Android.
• Webmail in a browser for when you are on someone else's computer.

Use IMAP rather than POP3, so messages stay on the server and every device shows the same inbox. Always choose the encrypted (SSL/TLS) ports.

Step 5: test delivery

• Send a message to a personal address with a large free provider and check it lands in the inbox, not spam.
• Look at the message headers. You want to see SPF and DKIM marked as pass.
• Reply from the personal address to make sure incoming mail arrives.

Common problems

• Mail goes to spam: usually a missing or broken SPF or DKIM record, or two SPF records.
• Nothing arrives: check the MX record, and that the mail record is not proxied through Cloudflare.
• Mailbox full: clear out old attachments or move that person to a bigger mailbox.

Business email with Zebra

Zebra's business email is priced per mailbox, so you only pay for what you use:

• 10 GB mailbox from €1.49 a month, with webmail (Roundcube), IMAP and SMTP, spam filtering, SSL and aliases.
• 50 GB mailbox at €2.99 a month, adding advanced spam and virus scanning and shared calendars.
• 250 GB mailbox at €6.99 a month, with priority support.

Mix sizes on one domain, pay monthly or yearly with two months free, and add mailboxes later from your client area. Mailboxes are set up automatically in about two minutes after payment. If you also need a website, our shared hosting plans include email accounts as well.