--- title: "Using Custom Email Addresses: A Professional Touch for Your Business" date: 2020-06-30T05:00:00-04:00 author: Sean Smith canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-03/episode-8/email/" section: Podcast --- <!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Season 03 Episode 8 – Jun 30, 2020 13:00 [Show Notes](#show-notes) ## Using Custom Email Addresses: A Professional Touch for Your Business  0:00 0:00 1.0x 0.75x1.0x1.25x1.5x2x [](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-03/07-Email-master.mp3) In this episode, Sean and Mike discuss the importance of using custom email addresses for your business. They explain how to set up CNAME records to connect your company domain with Google Suite or other email services like Gmail and Hotmail. ### Show Notes - Why shouldn’t I use a free email address that ends with @hotmail.com or @gmail.com? - How you can use a free email service while keeping your company domain name in your email address. - Free email options provided by cPanel in shared hosting accounts. - The plus ("+") hack - Email address naming best practices ### Show Links - [Gsuite](https://gsuite.google.com/) Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology. **\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, and welcome to another episode of the website 101 podcast. I'm Sean Smith your co-host and with me as always is Mike Miller. Hey Sean, how are you? I'm doing great and Mike, today's topic is going to be a short one, but important. We're going to talk about email. **\[00:18\]** **Mike:** Yeah, this is going to be great. We'll have some really good suggestions in here, but yeah, it shouldn't be a very long episode at all. **\[00:26\]** **Sean:** Now every business needs email to survive these days, you've got a website, you've got email. So, I think the biggest thing that I need to stress for a lot of do it yourself for and small start-up people, they get their business, they get a website, and then their email is is my business name at hotmail.com, or funkybusinessatgmail.com. That's right. And it's really unprofessional. And I personally have trouble trusting somebody who's using free email. It's to me, it feels like you're not dedicated to your business. I can't trust that you're gonna be around in the future. If I want to use you again, or if I need support, depending on what kind of service **\[01:17\]** **Mike:** you've had. Yeah, it gives off an error of, you probably don't take your business all that seriously. So why should I kind of thing, right? **\[01:25\]** **Sean:** Yeah, it's like somebody working out of their basement or, you know, like, they've got a van in an alley and they're, you know, hey, you want to buy a watch? **\[01:36\]** **Mike:** Yeah, right, under the trench coat. You want to buy an email address? So, one of the reasons people use these email addresses, though Gmail and Hotmail and all that, is because of their simplicity. It's very easy to set up an email account, right? Absolutely. But we're going to explain a few ways where you can leverage that same simplicity and the power of those email systems without using the at hotmail.com domain or whatever it is, right? Yeah, exactly. **\[02:05\]** **Sean:** So the scary part that is going to be setting up your C name records, and this is part of your DNS. but it's really not that scary. Anywhere that you sign up for an email service, they will give you step-by-step instructions about how to set up your C-Name records, okay? Even your domain registrar, a lot of them, include an option to set up C-Name records for Gmail. You can set that up, and when you do, it will connect to your Google Suite account, allowing you to use your company domain with Google Mail. So it has the exact same interfaces Gmail, but instead of being my company at gmail.com, instead it'll be my name at my company.com. So for example, I use G Suite as does Mike. And my email is Sean at caffeinecreations.ca. And I've hooked it up to Gmail. **\[03:15\]** **Mike:** Yeah, mine too. Mine is Mike at B-Likewater.ca, but it's actually running through Google's email service, which is the same service they use to power Gmail addresses. **\[03:26\]** **Sean:** And making this change is just a matter of following the instructions to set up your CNAME. Go into GC sign up for it. Now, G Suite is a paid account. I'm grandfathered in on a free level, but it's $5 per month per user. So if you're a company of one, and you've got one user, it's only $5 a month, $60 a year, that is nothing in the grand scheme of things. **\[03:55\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and we should add that it is a good idea, I would say, to use these kind of Gmail or hotmail or whatever services to power your email addresses because they have a lot of anti spam features built into them. So the Gmail is used to recognizing spam messages. You'll still, I mean, I get spam all the time, but you'll probably get much less of it than if you were to use some other service for email that's not as well known, right? **\[04:28\]** **Sean:** Right. And to go back to the one user thing, that doesn't mean one email address. it means one user. So each user in your company domain can have multiple email addresses. So for example, I have Sean at caffeinecreations.ca, I have podcast at caffeinecreations.ca. I have internet at caffeinecreations.ca, which I use for signing up for services, right? **\[04:54\]** **Mike:** Yeah, he's nice to have a spoofie one that you can use for stuff like that. **\[04:58\]** **Sean:** Yeah, so you're not limited to that. Now Gmail does, or Google Suite does cost a little bit of money. There are two options that you can use that I'm aware of that don't cost money. The first one is if you're using shared hosting from C-Panel, most shared hosting gives you the option to set up webmail. Yes. I've used it a long time ago in the past. I don't think it's particularly a good interface, which is why probably a lot of people end up using Gmail or hotmail addresses. Yeah. Instead of taking that 15 or 20 minutes to configure it and get a proper email at your company. **\[05:40\]** **Mike:** Hi, hope you're enjoying this episode. We're always looking for topic suggestions from listeners, so if there's anything you like us to discuss in the future, please let us know. **\[05:51\]** **Sean:** We're also looking for guests. If you know somebody who would make a great guest, if you think you would be a good guest, please let us know. You can reach out to us at website 101podcast.com slash contact. **\[06:05\]** **Mike:** Yeah, but I will say, I do have some clients that are using their C-panel-powered email that just comes with their hosting account, and usually they do have, if you open up your email, okay, so you log into your C-panel to manage your website, you go to the email accounts section you see all your emails and you whatever contact at whatever you have set up and if you open up any one of them usually there's a set of instructions that you can Walk through and get it hooked up to your smart phone hooked up to Microsoft Outlook or any kind of app You're using like that to manage your email on other devices and sometimes they even have for popular devices like the iPhone for example, they have a little file that let you download, and if you open it up on your iPhone, you basically just open the file and all of a sudden that email is installed into your Apple Mail app. That took a while to spit out, but anyway. That's really, really convenient. Yeah, it is. And obviously, if it's something that you feel is a little beyond your expertise, feel free to reach out to Sean or I and we can help you hook it up. But generally if you're using something you just want a simple contact address so that you can sell your widgets online and people can get in touch. You can use the C panel ones and still have it hooked up to your smartphone so you **\[07:37\]** **Sean:** get your emails there. Right. Additionally, I really strongly recommend using G Suite because it does have a couple of features. One of them is that you can use the plus trick or the plus hack. And this is great for... So what you do is you have your email address. Let's say it's Sean at Company.com. And you want to sign up for something and you would go Sean plus the plus sign, company name at gmail.com and then you know that that email address is only used for that system that you signed up for. And then if you start getting spam addressed to that particular email address, you know who's responsible for selling your email. You know where it came from that's right. And additionally setting up this plus hack allows you to better set up tags and folders So that email will get routed into the right area. **\[08:42\]** **Mike:** Yeah, whenever you get messages that are coming from my awesome company at whatever your plus and then the rest of your email address, you can have whatever your email program is, handle it in a certain way because that's what the address looks like. **\[08:59\]** **Sean:** Right, so I've got some filters set up that flag things as expenses. So anything that I have a subscription comes and it goes into a filter that's pre-filtered but everything that ends up costing me money so I can find it easily. **\[09:13\]** **Mike:** That's great. It's the same principle as if you had a group of friends and anytime you get an email from those friends, they go into your friend's folder and you can just quickly look in there or work colleagues might be another folder. It's the same principle as that. **\[09:27\]** **Sean:** Exactly. One last thing that I would like to address is I've had several clients over the years come to me and say, hey, we no longer have access to this particular service because Sarah left our company and she's the one that signed up with it and we don't know the password and we can't get the recovery or anything like that. So what I recommend to all of my clients and anybody who asks me is that you set up a special email address and I recommend something like digital assets at your domain.com. And that email is used for anything that you sign up for. So if you're going to sign up for a subscription to Netflix, for your company, for whatever reason, you would sign up with digital assets at my company.com. And if somebody leaves your company because they quit or they get fired or whatever, you just change the password on that account, boom, they don't have access to it anymore. **\[10:31\]** **Mike:** Yeah, and I would add another benefit of using that sort of methodology, that's a good use case where you're buying assets, have an assets at whatever mycompany.com and use that for that. But something that I often see in my clients is they have personal email addresses like Sarah at mycompany.com and Sarah works in marketing and on their website, they might have to get in touch with us about this program, contact Sarah at so-and-so. And then Sarah Leaves and the contact address still has Sarah's name in it. So it's much better to have an email address that is marketing at mycompany.com or events at mycompany.com. So whoever it is on staff who's managing that account, if they come, if they go, it's not going to affect anything on the website, you just keep the same address and it's not going to look strange. **\[11:27\]** **Sean:** Yes. And additionally, if you use something like marketing at or my department at, you can set up forwarding rules so that they go to each person's individual email. Yeah, exactly. So you could have three people on the marketing team, and they all receive it. But there's only one public facing email. **\[11:47\]** **Mike:** Right. That's a good point. That's another good benefit. Yeah. The number of times I've had to go into client websites and locate every instance of Sarah at MyCompany.com because Sarah just left and we got to take that email off of the front end. Anyway, I don't like to think about the number of times. It's been a number of times. **\[12:07\]** **Sean:** All right. Well, I think that's a wrap on email. Mike, do you have anything else to add? **\[12:12\]** **Mike:** No, that's good. Nice and quick. Again, if you need any help with setting into this up, reach out to us and we'll be happy to help you out with that. **\[12:21\]** **Sean:** All right, have a great day. Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. My name is Sean Smith, your co-host, and you can find me at my website, caffeinecreations.ca on Twitter, caffeine creation that's spelled C-A-F-F-E-I-N-E-C-R-E-E-8-I-O-N. And also, I'm on LinkedIn, Caffeine Creations. **\[12:47\]** **Mike:** And I'm Mike Mella, and you can find me online at beelikewater.ca. And I'm also on LinkedIn and Twitter. My username is Mike Mella. That's M-I-K-E-M-E-L-L-L-A. Close Transcript Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact). 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