Free business email on your own domain: five ways to get one and how to set it up

A business email address is one that ends in your own name: hello@yourshop.com rather than an address at a free personal webmail service. People read the part after the @ before they read anything else, and an address on your domain tells them the message came from the business rather than from somebody who happens to work there. It also stays yours: if you change provider, the address moves with you, because it belongs to the domain and not to the company that stores the mail.

Free business email is that address without a monthly bill for the mailbox. It is a real thing, but two parts of it are never free. The first is the domain, which every registrar charges a yearly fee for. The second is somebody’s time and servers: a provider that stores your mail and sends it on your behalf pays for both, so a free plan is always a smaller version of something the provider also sells. The useful question is not “is it free?” but “what does this free option leave out, and will I notice?”

Searches for free company email, free corporate email and a free business email address all land on the same handful of options. This post walks through them, says honestly what each one lacks, and then sets one up from an empty domain to a first reply.

Every way of getting a business email account free of a monthly charge falls into one of five groups. They differ less in price than in what you actually get at your domain: a forwarding rule, a mailbox you can read, or a server you run.

• Email forwarding from your domain registrar. Mail to your domain is passed on to an inbox you already have.
• A mailbox bundled with a domain or hosting plan. The mailbox is free because something else is paid for.
• A free tier from a mail provider. A real mailbox at your domain, with limits on size, apps or sending.
• A free trial of a business email suite. The full product, for a fixed number of days.
• Running your own mail server. The software is free; everything around it is your job.

Many registrars include email forwarding with a domain. You create an address such as hello@yourshop.com in the registrar’s control panel, point it at an inbox you already read, and the registrar publishes the MX records that send your domain’s mail to its forwarding servers. Nothing is stored at your domain: each message is accepted and immediately sent on.

It costs nothing and takes five minutes, and for a small site that gets a few messages a month it can be enough. What it leaves out is everything that happens after the message arrives. Your reply goes out from the old address unless you also configure that inbox to send as your domain through an outgoing server, which most forwarding services do not provide. And forwarding interacts badly with authentication: the forwarding server sends the message on from its own address, so the original sender’s SPF check can fail at the final inbox, and a strict DMARC policy may push the message into spam. SPF is defined in RFC 7208 and DMARC in RFC 7489, and both treat forwarding as a case that needs special handling.

Some registrars include one or two mailboxes with a domain, and most shared web hosting plans include a handful. These are real mailboxes with webmail and, usually, IMAP, so a desktop or phone mail app can connect to them.

They are free only in the sense that the hosting is paid for, and they end when it does. Storage is often small. The mail is sent from the same shared server as hundreds of other customers’ websites, so its reputation depends on neighbours you cannot see, and spam filtering is whatever the host installed. If you already pay for hosting, a bundled mailbox is a reasonable start. If you do not, buying hosting to get one is the wrong way round.

A few mail providers offer a mailbox at your own domain on a plan that never expires. This is the closest thing to free business email with nothing hidden: a real mailbox, your domain, sending from your address, run by a company whose whole job is mail.

The limits are where these plans differ. On 1 October 2026, Zoho’s US pricing page listed a free plan for up to five users with 5 GB of storage each and one domain, used through the web and its mobile apps; IMAP, POP and ActiveSync were not included, so a desktop mail client cannot connect. Rasket Inbox, described in its own section below, includes one mailbox on every plan with 5 GB of mail, also used in the browser and as an installed app rather than over IMAP.

Before you choose a free tier, read the plan page for four things: how many users or mailboxes it allows, how much storage each one gets, whether desktop apps can connect over IMAP, and whether there is a cap on how much you can send in a day. Pricing pages change without notice, so check on the day you sign up.

The large office suites sell email together with documents, calendars and video calls, and they let you try the whole thing before paying. On 1 October 2026 Google Workspace’s pricing page offered 14 days at no cost, after which each user is billed monthly.

A trial is a good way to find out whether you want a suite. It is not free business email: when it ends you either pay or move your domain’s MX records somewhere else, and anything you set up in the meantime moves with you or is lost. Start a trial when you are ready to decide, not to put off deciding.

The software to run a mail server is free and has been for decades. You rent a server, install a mail transfer agent, a mailbox server and a spam filter, publish your MX record, and you have mail at your domain with no per-user charge at all.

It is the option that costs the most once you count your time. Many cloud networks block outbound port 25, which RFC 5321 delivery depends on, until you ask for it to be opened. A new server address has no sending reputation, so large mailbox providers treat its first messages with suspicion. You need a reverse DNS record that matches your server, DKIM signing, TLS certificates that renew, backups, and someone to read the logs when a customer says your reply never arrived. Run your own server if you want to learn how mail works; for a business, the mailbox is rarely where you want to spend that effort.

No free option has everything. This is the short version of what each one gives up, so you can match it to what you will actually miss.

One thing missing from the table is advertising. Free personal webmail is often paid for with ads; a business mailbox is usually paid for by the customers who outgrow the free plan instead. Check the plan page if ads would bother you.

Free company email for a team of two or three is realistic. Most free tiers allow a small number of mailboxes, and an address everybody shares, like support@, saves you from buying one mailbox per person just to answer customers. Look for shared mailboxes and aliases: an alias gives one mailbox a second address at no cost, so billing@ and hello@ can land in the same place.

Free corporate email for a larger company is a different question, and free enterprise email does not really exist. What an enterprise needs from email — single sign-on, retention rules, audit logs, legal holds, administrators who can recover a leaver’s mailbox, and a support line — is exactly what free plans leave out. People do search for free company mail and free corporate mail at that size, and the honest answer is that a free plan is where you start, not where a company of hundreds stays. Choose a provider whose paid plans you could live with, so that growing is a billing change rather than a migration.

Rasket is an email platform for developers: it sends and receives mail for applications. Rasket Inbox is the part of it people read and answer, and it is our version of free business email. Every plan, Free included, comes with one mailbox at a domain you have verified, shared with your team or personal to you, and no card is asked for to start.

The Inbox shares one account with the rest of Rasket, so the domain you verify for it can also send your application’s email. The receiving docs explain how mail reaches your domain, and the Inbox docs cover mailboxes, aliases and who can read what. If the records are new to you, start with what an MX record does.

The steps are the same whichever option you picked, because free business email with domain names you own always comes down to the same small set of DNS records. Your provider generates the values; your job is to copy them into the place your domain’s DNS is managed, which is usually the registrar.

1. Pick and register a domain — Choose a short name that is easy to spell aloud and register it at any registrar. The domain is the one part no option makes free, and whoever holds the registrar login controls where your mail goes.
2. Add the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records — Copy the records your mail provider gives you into the domain's DNS: MX for mail coming in, an SPF record and DKIM keys for mail going out, and a DMARC record that starts at p=none. Delete any old MX records.
3. Create a hello@ mailbox — Create your first mailbox at the provider, such as hello@ or your first name, and sign in to it. Use an address you are happy to print on an invoice, because changing it later means telling everyone.
4. Send a first message and reply to it — Send a message from the new mailbox to a personal address at another provider, then reply. Check that both arrive in the inbox rather than spam, and that the headers show SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing.
5. Add a second address — Add a second address, such as billing@ or support@, as an alias of the first mailbox or as a mailbox of its own. An alias costs nothing on most providers and keeps one inbox to read.

Each record has one job:

• MX tells other servers where to deliver mail for your domain. RFC 5321 defines how a sending server looks it up. There should be only your new provider’s MX records; an old one left behind will catch some of your mail.
• SPF is a TXT record listing the servers allowed to send as your domain. Keep one SPF record per domain and add each new sender to it rather than publishing a second one.
• DKIM publishes a public key so that receivers can check a signature your provider adds to every message. It proves the message was not changed on the way.
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when SPF and DKIM do not line up with the address in the From line, and where to send reports. Start with p=none, read the reports for a few weeks, then tighten it.

Send a message from the new address to a personal address at a different provider, and reply to it. Both should arrive in the inbox, not in spam. Then open the message’s original source in the receiving mailbox and find the Authentication-Results header: it should say spf=pass, dkim=pass and dmarc=pass for your domain.

If SPF fails, the record is missing your provider or there are two SPF records. If DKIM fails, the key was copied with a missing character or published under the wrong name. If DMARC fails while SPF and DKIM pass, they are passing for a different domain than the one in your From line. Our guide to DKIM, SPF and DMARC walks through each of these, and the glossary entries for SPF and DMARC say what every part of the record means.

Once the first address works, add the second: an alias like billing@, or a mailbox of its own for a colleague. That is the whole of it — a domain, four kinds of record, a mailbox and a test. The rest is choosing which free option’s limits you can live with until you outgrow them.