Custom Domain Email for Websites

Third-party email hosting services allow you to manage your custom domain email addresses with ease. Learn in this post how to create email addresses with a custom domain name.

There are popular third-party email services that offer services to create custom domain email addresses with ease, and provide better security compared to email hosting that comes with your web hosting package. Third-party email hosting services can be used without web hosting by just confirming the domain name ownership. In this post, we are going to learn how to create an email address with a custom domain name using the Yandex email services provider. Yandex is a multinational corporation providing a range of services and products similar to google and other famous corporations.

Benefits of Using A Third-Party Email Hosting Service

A web hosting company mostly focuses on the services and features related to web hosting, whereas an email hosting provider focuses on features mainly related to email services and mailboxes. Some of the benefits of an email service provider are:

Email Focused Features: Dedicated email service providers focus on features specifically related to emails.
Reliability: Third-party email hosting provides maximum uptime and reliability as compared to web hosting providers.
Advanced Email Features: Third-party email services provide advanced features like spam filtering, business tools for collaboration, and email groups to categorize employees/users into teams.
Email Storage: Third-Party email services usually provide a large or unlimited storage for emails as compared to what web hosting services provide.
Email Deliverability: Third-Party email hosting providers tend to have a better reputation than shared web hosting email servers. This increases the email deliverability and reduces the risk of being marked as spam.
Security: Third-party email services provide better security against spam and phishing with authentication methods like SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance).

How to Set Up Custom Domain Email with Yandex - Step-by-Step

Yandex mail provides support for emails with a custom domain, which requires confirming the ownership of the domain. It provides 1,000 mailboxes with 5GB of storage per mailbox with a free subscription. We are going to create a custom domain email using the Yandex email hosting service. The main steps to create an email with a domain name are as follows:

Step 1: Create an Account on Yandex

In order to use Yandex email services, formerly known has yandex mail for the domain, we first need to create an account on Yandex. Go to the Yandex registration page and create an account.

Step 2: Create an Organization in Yandex

The next step after registering with Yandex is to create an organization.

Click on the three dots with the text "More" in the top menu.
Click on "Manage organizations".

After clicking on Manage organizations we might be asked to enter our email and password again. On the organizations screen, click on "Create new organization" and follow the steps to create a new organization.

Step 3: Register a Domain at Yandex

After creating an organization, we will be taken to our organization page. The next step is to create a domain following these steps:

Click on "Domains" under "General Settings" in the left side navigation menu.
On the Domains page, enter a domain name for which we want to set up email accounts.

Step 4: Verify Domain Ownership

After the domain has been created, we will see the domain verification page to verify the newly created domain. We can verify domain ownership with three methods.

By confirming with a DNS record.
By adding a meta tag to our website's HTML head element.
By adding an HTML file to our website's root directory.

We can verify the domain ownership using any of the above methods of choice.

Step 5: Add MX Records in DNS

After domain ownership verification, we need to add an MX (Mail Exchange) record in order to send and receive emails for our custom domain email addresses.

Click on the Configure MX record button.
Log in to cPanel or Cloudflare and navigate to the DNS records page.
Add the provided MX record from Yandex.
Click on check after adding the MX record in the domain's DNS records.

Step 6: Add SPF Record for Authentication

The next step is to add an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record to avoid incoming messages landing in the spam folder. SPF records verify which email servers can send emails on behalf of a domain, preventing the risk of email spoofing.

Click on the "Configure SPF" button.
Copy the DNS TXT record value.
Go to the domain's DNS records page and add a TXT record for SPF.

Step 7: Add DKIM Record to Improve Deliverability

After adding the SPF record, the next step is to add DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail). DKIM verifies the authenticity of the emails that are sent from our domain.

Click on the "Configure DKIM" button on the domain settings page.
Go to the DNS records page of Cloudflare or cPanel.
Add a TXT record for DKIM copied from the Yandex DKIM configuration page.

That is it, we can now add an email with a custom domain name using Yandex email services. An important thing to mention is that it might take 72 hours to verify domain ownership, MX record, SPF record and DKIM record.

Step 8: Create & Manage Email Accounts

Yandex offers a rich interface for creating and managing email accounts for registered and verified custom domains. Steps to create an email account on Yandex:

Click on "Employees" under "Users" in the left side navigation menu of the Yandex organization page.
Click on "+ Add" and click "Add Manually" in the dropdown menu.
Enter the employee details for the email address with a custom domain.
Click on "Add".

We learnt in this post step-by-step how to create an email with a domain name using the email hosting service of Yandex. We can also configure our custom domain email addresses for email clients like MS Outlook and Mailbird.