What is a business email?
A business email is an email that has your name and the name of your business in it.
For example: instead of having ‘YourName@gmail.com’ as one’s email;
it would be ‘you@skylearn.com’.
Why we need a business email?
So that people will know that you’re serious!
If you use a general email such as preet@gmail.com or preet@yahoomail.com for business purposes, you appear like an individual.
So, what do you use?
In that case, using a business email like Preet@skylearn.com, makes you look more professional for business purpose.
It also serves as a way of advertising the business name, every time you get to use this email.
You can also use a business email for different sections of your business.
For example, you can create a support@yoursite.com email for customer support purposes,
contact@yoursite.com for receiving emails from your customers etc.
Let’s cut to the chase and get this done step by step.
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Well, in this article, you would learn how to get a business email for free.
How does this work?
We are going to be creating a business email and link it with Gmail.
Linking to Gmail makes our email easy to manage as we would be able to manage our business email right from our Gmail inbox.
What do we need?
To follow this guide, all you need to have is a domain name from GoDaddy. This is an easy process, you can quickly get one here.
If you do not have a domain yet, quickly get your domain from GoDaddy, and join us and continue following this tutorial to gaining professionalism.
So, after you have got the domain!
Now if you try to create an email account that domain
You would need to pay about 5 dollar a month for creating a business email.
So,in this article we will teach you how you can avoid paying that amount and create your business email address for free !
So, Let’s get started !
We would be creating a business email address in just 5 steps.
Step 1 : Log into GoDaddy
Visit GoDaddy’s website godaddy.com, and then sign in.
Step 2: Create an Email Forward in GoDaddy
So why do we need this? This enables us to forward all mails being received in this business email to our Gmail inbox.
Let’s do this:
After GoDaddy sign-in, scroll to the bottom of the page to find an additional products section.
On clicking on this section, you would see the option for email forwarding.
Next to email forwarding, there would be a button saying “Redeem” at the far right-hand side. Click on this button.
On clicking the redeem button, a new page should come up.
From this new page, click on the “Create Forward” link.
This would load up a new section for creating a forward address.
In this section, enter the following:
“Forward this email address:” Type in the business email of choice, for example: contact@yoursite.com.
“To these email addresses:” Type in your Gmail address here.
Leave the other options as they are and then click the “Create” button,
and your email forward would be created.
Step 3: Check if our DNS settings are setup correctly
So why do we have to check this?
Our DNS settings are responsible for ensuring that our emails are being forwarded.
Here is how we do this:
From the GoDaddy dashboard, click tools and then click “server settings”.
This loads up a section where we can change server settings such as our DNS settings.
Most times, we would have an error on this newly loaded page, showing “No MX records were found”.
What this means is that our newly created email forward won’t work.
So, Let’s fix our DNS before moving on to the next step!
Before we start !
Note down the details under the heading ‘correct settings’ in notepad
To fix your DNS, you need to change the DNS settings from your hosting provider.
If you have your hosting with GoDaddy, you can proceed with the next few steps. Else, you would have to edit your DNS settings from your host’s website.
Here is how we change our DNS settings from GoDaddy:
1.Visit godaddy.com.
2.Click on your profile icon.
3.Click on “My Products”.
4.Next to your domain name in the “Domains” section, click “DNS”.
5.Go to the bottom of “Records ” and click “Add”
6.In the “Type” field, choose “MX”.
7.In the “Host” field, type in “@”.
8.In the “Points to” field, Remember the details which we noted down in notepad under “Correct Settings” table and
copy the first address
paste it here.
9.In the “Priority” field, you should the paste the value in front of the address, in the 1st value, it’s the number ‘0’.
10.Now click “Save”.
11.Next we would add the second entry by clicking “Add”.
13.Repeat the same things in the steps 7 and 8.
14.In the “Points to” field, copy the second address under the “Correct Settings” table earlier and
paste it here.
15.In the “Priority” field, paste the value in front of the address, in this case the value added to the field is the number 10.
16.Now click “Save”.
Now return to the GoDaddy dashboard, click “tools” and then “Server Settings.”
It would load up our server settings, and this time around, we should not have any errors.
To confirm this, you would see “Your MX records are correct” with a green tick beside it. This means that our email forwarding should work as expected.
So now let’s see if our mails are forwarding properly.
Using a random email address (not the one being connected to our business email), compose a sample email and send it to the business email address.
Once you refresh the Gmail account connected to the business email, you should receive the email you sent to your business email in your Gmail account.
So now if you open that mail, you can see that it was sent to our business email.
Success! We have successfully connected our business email to our Gmail account for free.
Wait, a minute:
It doesn’t end here, there is still more to do to complete the whole process.
Here is why:
If you try replying that email just received in your Gmail account, you would find out that the email would be sent using our Gmail address instead of our business email address.
Not professional, like we wanted!
How do we work around this?
It is pretty simple. To send emails from the business email, we would need an SMTP server. So we are going to the next step:
STEP 4: Get a free server from SMTP2GO.
First, we are going to set up an account on SMTP2GO, by visiting the website www.smtp2go.com.
When the sites loads, you should see an option saying “Try SMTP2GO Free”.
Enter the needed details and sign-up for your SMTP2GO account.
Once you have succeeded in signing up, you would get a new page showing us our SMTP2GO username and password.
Keep both safe, we would need them later on.
You would see a “finish” button on the SMTP2GO page, do not click that yet as we would do that later.
Next, we are going to add this SMTP2GO account to our Gmail account.
STEP 5: Add SMTP2GO Account to our Gmail account.
A reminder:
We are doing this to be able to send emails from our business email address using our Gmail account.
Let’s add this account to our Gmail:
Go to your Gmail account settings and click on the “Accounts and Import” section.
From this section, you should see a field with the title “Send mail as:”. Click on the “Add another email address” link there
and fill in the empty boxes.
Whatever you put into the “Name” box is the name that would appear when someone receives an email from you. Therefore, to look professional, enter the name of your business.
In the email address box, enter the same email which we use for setting up email forward earlier.
When you are done, click on “Next Step.”
There would be some fields for entering other details. These fields should be SMTP Server, Port, Username, Password fields.
For the username and password fields, this is the username and password shown to us after creating our SMTP2GO account earlier.
Now from your SMTP2GO page, you can click the “finish” button. After doing this, you would see in your dashboard: SMTP Server.
Copy and paste the SMTP Server into your Gmail settings and choose the Port to be 25.
Now, click “Add Account”.
When you do this, Gmail would send a verification code to your business email.
Remember we have already connected it to our Gmail account? This means we can check for this email in your Gmail account.
Check for the email and copy-paste the verification code, then click “Verify”.
Success! We should now be able to send emails using our business email address from Gmail.
To check if the email has been added to your Gmail account, you check your Gmail settings, click on the “Accounts and Import” section.
Under the “Send mail as:” field, you would notice that our business email is now listed.
If you wish to make the business email our default email for sending messages, you click the “make default” link.
Let’s test if things are working as expected
Compose a new email, you would notice in the “From” field, you would be able to change the email address that you wish to use in sending your email
Select the business email and use it in sending a mail to another email address.
If you check this email address, you should receive an email and it should come from the business email instead of your Gmail.
Perfect:
However, there is one thing. In this received email, you would see something like “via smtpservice.net”.
That’s not professional enough. To take that out.
Do this:
1. Go to SMTP2GO dashboard & Click on Settings.
2. Click on “Sender Domains”
3. Click “Add a domain”.
4. Then enter your domain. For example: Quicktechy.com.
5. Click “Add Domain”.
So in order to remove the “sent via” message in Gmail We need to give SMTP2GO access to make use of our domain.
So to do that ,
Add these two entries from the Sender Domains section , into our dns page
So again visit Godaddy and click my product
From your domain, click “DNS”.
2. Scroll down on the loaded page and click “ADD”.
3. Under “Type”, select “TXT”.
5. In the “Host” field, copy host name under the “Configure your SPF record” in SMTP2GO settings and paste here.
6. In the “TXT Value” field, copy the value next to the host name under the “Configure your SPF record” in SMTP2GO settings and paste here.
7. Click save.
8. For the second entry, click “ADD”
9. Under “Type”, select CNAME
10. In the “Host” field, copy host name under the “Configure your DKIM record” in SMTP2GO settings and paste here.
11. In the “TXT Value” field, copy the value next to the host name under the “Configure your DKIM record” in SMTP2GO settings and paste here.
Now click “Save”.
Let’s verify that things are well set up on SMTP2GO. Under “Sender Domains”, click on the “Verify” button.
If you have green ticks on both entries, then everything was properly setup.
Let’s test that the “via smtpservice.net” has actually been removed by sending another email.
Using Gmail, send another email as done the first time.
Check for the sent email, and you would notice that the “via smtpservice.net” is no longer being displayed.
This looks much more professional.
And this concludes our business email setup.
Also, if you need to send more than 1000 emails per month:
When your business gets lots of customers and you need to reach to all of them, SMTP2GO wouldn’t handle your emails for free anymore.
Why? SMTP2GO restricts the free account to 1000 emails per month.
If you need more, you can use SparkPost. Check them out at sparkpost.com.
Checking their Pricing Plans sparkpost.com/pricing, you would see that you can send 15,000 emails per month using the free developer account.
If you are just starting out, you can stick with SMTP2GO as long as you don’t exceed their limit.
However, if you need to send over 1,000 emails per month to your clients, then SparkPost’s 15,000 free emails per months is the plan to choose.
I hope this article was useful to you.
Please leave a comment to let us know if it worked for you.
Thanks for reading till the end.skylearn
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