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Using email with a domain name

How to manage email in Outlook with your own domain name.

Rick J writes

I have my own domain name and I want to make email accounts for me and family using it. What’s the best option for me?”.

Firstly, congratulations on making the switch to a permanent email address. Having your own domain name means you control your email address.

We’ve seen plenty of people setup a domain name just for themselves (eg FredDagg.com ) or for their extended family (eg ClanDagg.com or DaggFamily.net ).

Once you have the domain name you can allocate permanent email addresses [email protected] , [email protected] etc). These addresses don’t change when you switch internet providers or change from one email host to another (Hotmail / Gmail / Yahoo etc).

With a permanent email address you can change email setup with no need to mess around changing email address at all the web sites, businesses and people who have it.

In other words you’re separating the email address from where email is delivered to. That gives you a lot more flexibility. Analogy time: it’s like a PO Box – mail always goes to the PO Box but your street address can change.

Once you have a domain and have given yourself an email address (eg [email protected]) here are some of the options available to you.


Outlook

The simplest way is to make your existing email account (for example with an Internet Provider) look like it has your personal address.

Firstly, redirect your personal email address (eg [email protected] ) to the email account where you collect email from (probably an ISP provided email account).  See your domain management service for details on how to do that – look for ’email alias’ or ’email redirection’ options.

Then change your outgoing email address. Do this in Outlook in the account settings for your email account. Change the email address next to ‘Your name’ to the permanent email address.

Outlook - change email address in POP settings.jpg image from Using email with a domain name at Office-Watch.com

Notice that the logon User Name to access the email account is different from the email address that’s given, with your name, on outgoing messages.

Finally, test your new outgoing and incoming email setup. Send a message from Outlook to an external location (maybe your own webmail account) and make sure the FROM name and email address are correct. Then send a test email to your permanent email address and make sure it arrives in Outlook.


New Email Account

There are plenty of other places that offer email hosting however it’s not really necessary to pay for it.

Some domain name retailers offer email hosting as well. GoDaddy.com, among the blizzard of offers they make after buying a domain, offer email hosting for $1.20 a month or less.

Gmail and Hotmail offer plenty of storage plus links to Outlook and mobile devices – for no charge.

When you have the account setup you can link it to Outlook (using POP or IMAP), making sure that the outgoing email address is your permanent email address (as shown above).


Online Hosting of all Outlook data

You can go all the way and have your entire Outlook data (calendar, contacts etc, as well as email) hosted online.

Google Apps and Office 365 offer reasonably priced services ($50 – $70 per year) that will host all your Outlook data and make it available to mobile devices as well.

These services are marketed to businesses of all sizes but there’s no reason why individuals, families or extended families can’t make use of the service.

Both services are intended to be used on a domain-wide basis (though they don’t have to be). You can arrange for all email sent to any address in the domain to be sent to email accounts. Tech speak: the MX records are set to the Google/Office 365 mail servers).

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