How to set up business email with your own domain

How to set up business email and office apps, step by step

1. Confirm the domain you want in your addresses and make sure you control its DNS settings.
2. Choose an email and office suite, and decide who needs a full mailbox and who only needs a shared address.
3. Create the mailboxes, plus shared addresses such as info or billing, in the admin console.
4. Add the provider's MX, SPF and DKIM records at your registrar, then send test messages in and out.
5. Move old mail, contacts and calendars across, and switch phones and laptops to the new accounts.
6. Turn on two-step sign-in for every account before you announce the new addresses.

What to look for

Editorial assessment

• How mailboxes are billed Check whether shared addresses and aliases need their own paid user or come free with the plan. That decides whether generic addresses add to the bill.
• DNS setup help Look for a setup guide that shows the exact records to add at your registrar. Wrong DNS records are a common reason mail goes missing after a switch.
• Import from your old mail Check what the suite can bring over from your current mailbox, including contacts and calendars, so nobody starts from an empty inbox.
• Admin controls for people who leave You need to suspend an account, reset a password and pass a departing employee's mail to a colleague. Test this in the trial, not on the day someone quits.
• Office apps your clients use If clients send you documents and spreadsheets, check how the suite's apps open and edit those files without breaking formatting.
• Storage per mailbox Check whether mail and files share one storage allowance per user, and what happens when a heavy user fills it.

What to settle before you buy

• Which domain will the addresses use, and who holds the login to the registrar?
• Who needs a full mailbox, and which addresses can be shared aliases or groups?
• Does your team already work mostly in one office suite's documents and spreadsheets?
• Which other tools should people sign in to with these accounts, such as chat, file storage or accounting?
• Who will be the admin who creates accounts and handles people who leave?
• How much old mail must come across, and from where?

How we built this page

We start from the job, not the product. The phrasings people search for this job (for example “how to set up business email”) come from our research into how small and mid-size teams describe it. Which software categories the job takes is our editorial judgment. Every tool, entry price, billing unit and date comes from HelpCompare’s open dataset, recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page; nothing is estimated, and where a vendor publishes no price we say so. We take no affiliate commissions and publish no scores of our own. See our methodology or download the data from Open Data.

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