How to set up business email with your own domain

Business email on your own domain, so your address reads you@yourbusiness.com.au instead of a Gmail or Hotmail address, is one of the fastest ways to look like a real business. It takes three things: a domain name, an email service to hold your mailboxes, and a handful of DNS records to wire them together. You do not need a website to do it. The part most people miss is the set of records that keep your mail out of customers' spam folders, and that is the part that actually costs you money when it goes wrong. Here is the whole thing in plain English, including what it costs in Australia.

Why it is worth doing

A free webmail address quietly tells a customer you are a hobby. A domain address tells them you are a business. It also means you own your identity. Change email providers down the track and your address stays the same, because it is tied to your domain, not to Google or Microsoft. And you can add staff mailboxes like sales@ and accounts@ as you grow. Small change, big return.

The three pieces you need

1. A domain name, for example yourbusiness.com.au. This is what your email address is built on. A .com.au requires an ABN, which you will have as an Australian business.
2. An email service to hold the mailboxes. The two common choices are Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Both are built for small business and both are billed per mailbox per month.
3. DNS records that point your domain's mail to that service and prove it is legitimate: the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. More on these below, because they are the bit that catches people out.

Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?

Short version: either one is fine, and the difference matters far less than getting the setup right. Both give you a proper mailbox on your domain, a calendar, shared drives and the mobile apps. Pick on habit, not hype.

Go with Google Workspace if you already live in Gmail, Google Docs and a Google calendar on your phone. It is the lighter option and the admin side is simpler for a one or two person business. Go with Microsoft 365 if you use Outlook, or you want the desktop Word, Excel and Outlook apps bundled in rather than paid for separately. If you send a lot of spreadsheets and quotes in Office formats, that bundle usually pays for itself. Both scale from a single mailbox up to a team, so you are not locking yourself out of anything by starting small. What you should not do is run your business mail on a free personal account of either, because you cannot put it on your own domain and you do not properly own it.

The steps

1. Register the domain, or use one you already own.
2. Sign up for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace and create your mailbox or mailboxes.
3. Verify the domain with the provider. They give you a record to add to your DNS to prove you own it.
4. Add the mail records: the MX records that route mail to the service, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
5. Set it up on your devices. Add the account to your phone and computer, and you are sending and receiving.

The bit everyone skips: SPF, DKIM and DMARC

If your business email keeps landing in spam, this is almost always why. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are small DNS records that prove your email genuinely comes from your domain. Without them, other mail servers treat your messages as suspicious and quietly bin them, which means quotes and invoices your customers never see. You do not get a bounce, you do not get a warning, the mail just does not arrive. Getting these three right is the single most important step for making sure your email lands. They are fiddly and easy to get subtly wrong, which is the main reason people ask for help with this step rather than the rest.

What it costs in Australia

There are two ongoing costs: the domain, billed yearly, and the email service, billed per mailbox per month. Both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have entry-level small-business plans. Prices change, so check the provider's current Australian pricing before you commit, but a single professional mailbox is a modest monthly cost, not a big upfront outlay. If it were my own gear, I would not agonise over the few dollars a month difference between the two. Pick the one whose calendar and documents you already live in.

You do not need a website first

Email and a website are two separate things that people often bundle in their heads. The domain carries the email. The website is optional and can come whenever you are ready. Register the domain, get email running on it today, and add the site later without your address changing. Plenty of businesses run on a domain email for months before they build anything at all.

Common mistakes that cost people

Most of the trouble I see with domain email is not exotic. It is the same handful of avoidable errors.

1. Skipping SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Covered above, and it is the big one. People get mail flowing, send a test to their mate, it lands, and they assume it is done. Then invoices start disappearing into other companies' spam and they have no idea why.
2. Leaving old records behind. If your domain used to run email somewhere else, stale MX or SPF records from the old host can fight the new ones. Clear out what you are no longer using so there is one clear answer to where your mail goes.
3. Running the business off aliases only. A forward that dumps everything into your personal Gmail feels free and easy, but you cannot reliably reply as the business address, and your sent mail comes from the wrong place. Set up a real mailbox.
4. No second admin and no recovery details. If one person holds the only login and they leave, or lose the phone that gets the login code, you can lose control of the account your whole business runs on. Add a second admin and record the recovery details somewhere safe from day one.

None of these are hard to avoid. They just get skipped when someone is rushing to get email working and moves on the moment the first message sends.

Moving your old email across

Switching does not mean losing anything. Your existing emails and contacts can be migrated to the new mailbox, and the changeover should be done carefully so no mail bounces or goes missing while it happens. The order matters here: you want the new mailbox live and tested before you point the domain's mail at it, so there is no window where messages fall through the gap. Done right, you flip over with everything intact and nobody who emails you notices a thing.

Let us set it up

Registering a domain, standing up mailboxes and getting the mail records right is exactly the kind of fiddly-but-quick job we do for new businesses every week. It is an hour or two of our time to save you a fortnight of your mail landing in spam without you knowing. Tell us your business name and we will register your domain, set up your email, make sure it lands in inboxes and not spam, and connect it on your devices, so you look the part from day one.