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 custom domain name.

There are popular third-party email services that offer services to create custom domain email addresses with ease and providing 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 custom domain name using 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 benefits of email service provider are: 

• Email Focused Features: Dedicated email service providers focus on feature 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, Email groups to categorize employees/users into teams.
• Email Storage: Third-Party email services provide usually 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 as compared to shared web hosting email servers. Which increases the email deliverability and reduces the risk of being marked as spam.
• Security: Third-party email services provide better security against spams 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 Setup Custom Domain Email with Yandex - Step-by-Step

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

Step 1: Create an Account on Yandex

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

 

Step 2: Create an Organization in Yandex

Next step after registering with Yandex is to create an organization.

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

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

 

Step 3: Register a Domain at Yandex

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

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

 

Step 4: Verify Domain Ownership

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

1. By confirming with a DNS record.
2. By adding meta tag to our websites HTML head element.
3. By adding an HTML file in 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 MX (Mail Exchange) record in order to send and receive emails for our custom domain email addresses. 

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

 

Step 6: Add SPF Record for Authentication

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

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

 

Step 7: Add DKIM Record to Improve Deliverability

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

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

That is it, we can now add email with custom domain name using Yandex email services. Important thing to mention is 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 domain. Steps to create an email account on yandex: 

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

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