How to set up business email on your own domain.

An address like you@yourbusiness.com does two jobs. It looks like a real business, and, less obviously, it makes your email something the business owns. A free personal address belongs to a person and a provider. An address on your own domain belongs to whoever controls the domain and the mail account behind it, which can and should be the business.

Why not just use a gmail.com address?

Plenty of good businesses run on a free address, and customers rarely complain. The problem is not looks. It is control.

• A free account is tied to one person’s login. If that person leaves, forgets the password or loses the phone used for two-factor authentication, the business’s customer history goes with them.
• You cannot add a second address for a new hire on the same account, or take over a departing employee’s mailbox, because there is no admin above the account.
• Every account you register with that address, from your Google Business Profile to your supplier portals, is recoverable only by whoever controls that one inbox.
• You cannot publish the email authentication records that tell the world which mail really comes from you, because you do not control the domain gmail.com. That matters for deliverability and for impersonation.

Google Workspace vs Microsoft 365

For most small businesses the choice is between these two. Both give you mailboxes on your own domain, a calendar, document storage and an admin console where the business controls every user. Both are paid per user per month, and prices and plan names change often enough that you should read them on the vendor’s own pricing page on the day you sign up.

Neither is the wrong answer. Pick the one your team already knows, because the main cost of switching is people relearning their tools, not the subscription. A body shop in Kissimmee and a law office in Winter Park can reasonably end up on different sides of this.

Avoid email bundled free with a website builder or hosting plan if you can. It ties your inbox to your website host, so changing one means migrating the other.

Who should own the admin account

This is the decision that matters most and the one usually made by accident. Whoever signs up for Workspace or Microsoft 365 becomes the first administrator. In Google’s terms that is the super admin, the one account that can do everything, including deleting every other user. If your IT person, nephew or web designer signs up from their own laptop with their own phone number, they hold your email.

• Sign up yourself, with a business card on the billing account.
• Make the top admin a dedicated address that is not anyone’s day-to-day mailbox, for example admin@ or it@ on your domain. Google’s own guidance for super admins is an address not tied to one person, protected with multi-factor authentication.
• Have two people at the business who can sign in as a top-level admin, so one lost phone does not lock you out.
• Give your IT provider or agency a lesser admin role, or a second admin account you can delete, rather than the top seat.
• Store the admin credentials and recovery codes somewhere the business controls, not in one person’s head.

Setting it up, step by step

1. Confirm you can log in to wherever your domain’s DNS is managed. If you cannot, fix that first. The guide on checking who owns your domain shows how.
2. Sign up with the provider using your domain, and create the first admin account as described above.
3. Verify the domain. The provider shows you a TXT record to add in your DNS. Adding it does not affect existing email. Click verify once it is saved; it may take a little while to be seen.
4. Create mailboxes for each person, plus shared or group addresses such as info@ or service@ so customer mail does not depend on one employee.
5. If you have existing mail on the domain, move it before you switch. Both providers have migration tools for importing old mailboxes.
6. Switch the MX records. These tell the world where to deliver your mail. Copy the exact values from the provider’s admin console rather than from a blog. At the time of writing (October 2026), Google lists a single MX record, smtp.google.com, with priority 1. Microsoft gives each domain its own value in its admin center. Delete the old MX records, because Google warns that leftover ones can stop mail working properly.
7. Wait and test. Google says MX changes can take up to 72 hours to be recognized everywhere. Send mail in and out from an outside account during that window.

The three records that stop someone sending as you

Getting mail delivered is half the job. The other half is publishing the records that tell receiving servers which mail genuinely comes from your domain: SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Without them, your own messages are more likely to land in spam, and a stranger can put your address in the From line of an invoice scam more easily. Each provider walks you through SPF and DKIM in its admin console, and DMARC is a record you add yourself. Our guide on whether your email can be spoofed explains what each one does and how to check yours in a few minutes.

What to do next

If you already have business email, sign in to its admin console and check who the top admins are. If the only one is someone outside your business, ask them to add you as a top-level admin today, then make the account changes above. If you are still on a free address, choose a provider, sign up yourself, and move one mailbox first before you move everyone.

All of this is doable yourself. If you want help, we set up business email for Central Florida companies with the admin account in the business’s name from the first click, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC done on the same day.