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 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

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, you first need to create an account on Yandex. Go to Yandex registration page and create an account.

 

Step 2: Create an Organization

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 you might be asked to enter your email and password again. On organizations screen click on "Create new organization" and follow the steps to create new organization.

 

Step 3: Add a Domain

After creating an organization you will be taken to your 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 you want to setup email accounts.

 

Step 4: Confirm Domain Ownership

After the domain has been created you will be seeing domain verification page to verify the newly created domain belongs to you. You can verify domain ownership with three methods.

1. By confirming with a DNS record.
2. By adding meta tag to your websites HTML head element.
3. By adding an HTML file in your website's root directory.

Verify the domain ownership using any of the above methods of your choice.

 

Step 5: Add MX Record

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

• Click on Configure MX record button.
• Login to your 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 your domain's DNS records.

Step 6: Add SPF Record

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 your domain preventing the risk of email spoofing.

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

Step 7: Add DKIM Record

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

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

That is it, you can now add email with 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.

• Click on "Employees" under "Users" in left side navigation menu of your 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".

You can also configure your custom domain email addresses for email clients like MS Outlook and Mailbird.