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While most commonly used to send and receive emails to gmail.com email addresses, Google‘s Gmail client provides that (free) personal account holders can also choose to send and receive emails from their unique domain names, not just gmail.com.
We’ll take you through a quick set-up video on how to use Gmail to send and receive emails through a custom domain name. First, we run through a few scenarios for which a Gmail client setup for your custom domain URLs would make sense.
Are you adding a new custom domain email?
Here are some appropriate scenarios for using Gmail with your custom domain URL.
- Are you already enjoying Google products? if the answer is ‘YES’, then Gmail is an excellent option for managing custom domain email addresses. If you do anything business-related online, you may already utilize at least a couple of Google products. Common Google properties and services include Google Analytics, Adwords, Google Data Studio, Gmail (obviously), Google Calendar, and Google Voice, to name just a few. By routing your personal domain email address through Gmail, you’ll be keeping your workflow streamlined.
- Safe Storage. Perhaps you own a domain and have a hosting provider, but wisely, you don’t want to keep your emails on your server or you want a reliable backup to your server webmail client. Gmail is a great way to get emails off of your server. When you adhere to Google’s suggested security measures (2-step verification, Strong Passwords, Backup codes, etc.), you get safe storage and reduce the clutter on your host account. Since this service by Gmail is free, it’s a win-win.
- Multiple Custom Domains. You can add up to 5 unique domain name email addresses per Gmail account for Free. So if you are running or launching a small business with multiple emails, such as service@yourdomain, support@yourdomain, sales@yourdomain, johndoe@yourdomain, and janedoe@yourdomain, you can manage them all from 1 place quickly and easily with no extra overhead.
Steps: How to Send & Receive emails with my custom domain name via Gmail
'Send From' set-up steps:
- Log in to Gmail (the example below is on a desktop or laptop device)
- Click the Settings Icon at the top (right) of the navigation menu.
- Click the ‘See all settings‘ tab.
- Click the ‘Accounts and Import’ tab.
- Next to ‘Send mail as‘, click the ‘Add another email address link
- Select and enter your email alias name.
- Add your custom domain email address.
- Note: We chose to ‘Treat as an alias’ i.e. this will not be the main or default ‘Send From’ email. With this choice, we will be able to select this email address
as the “From Email” when sending emails. - Next, enter your custom domain server details: (SMTP server, Username, Password, Secure Connection, Port) You’ll copy this info from your domain host. We copied our information from our Siteground hosting account in this example. For more information on setting up email accounts at Siteground, click here.
- Google will email you a verification code. Retrieve this email code from your custom domain host, you can log into your native hosting webmail client. Once you Verify, your custom ‘Send Email’ is ready!
- Now that our custom ‘Send From’ email is setup, we’ll now setup our custom ‘Check mail’
Receiving Email set-up steps:
- Log in to Gmail (the example below is on a desktop or laptop device)
- Click the Settings Icon at the top (right) of the navigation menu.
- Next to ‘Check mail from other account’, Click the ‘Add another account’ link.
- Enter the custom email address that you will be receiving through.
- You can ignore “Gmailify not available”
- Select ‘Import emails from my other account (POP3)
- Enter your Custom Email Address, Custom Email Password, and Custom Email Port Number, Check off email Retrieval options.
- We generally select “Always use a secure connection” and “Label incoming messages” only. However, you may find other setting combinations more appropriate for your needs. For example, you may for specific reasons want to leave a copy of the emails received on your host. We generally do not like to do this.
- You are now done!
- When you Compose or Reply to an Email, you can select your custom domain email by clicking the Down Arrow next to the ‘From’email alias in the Gmail composer (see video above)
- If you chose to label your incoming custom domain emails, you will see the new label under ‘Labels’ in the right column.
- PRO TIP: Gmail will check your custom email domain incrementally. But you can check instantly. Under: Settings > Accounts and Import > Check Mail From Other Accounts check your custom domain email by clicking ‘Check mail now’.
- You can add up to 5 custom domain emails per Gmail account.
Fun Email Facts
Gmail remains one of the most popular email clients in 2022
Gmail is used by more than 1.8 billion people around the World to send and receive emails daily. In terms of overall popularity, according to a recent survey of data published by litmus, Gmail holds down over 20% of the total email client market share in 2022, second only to Apple‘s native email client.
Email is still gaining popularity as a major form of communication Worldwide
Average Worldwide email usage is expected to top 375+ billion emails sent and received daily by 2025. With email numbers this staggering, you can be sure more companies and people will be looking for convenient ways to manage multiple accounts and Gmail is looking to be one of the major players in this arena for the foreseeable future.
