Free business email on your own domain: four free options and a safe way to switch

DNS is the internet’s address book: it tells other computers where your domain’s website and mail live. The entry for mail is the MX record (mail exchanger). Email hosting is the service it points at, and the host does five things: it receives your mail, stores it, filters out spam, lets you read it, and sends your replies. Sending your website’s own mail, such as receipts and password resets, is a different job; what an email service provider is explains the difference.

You read mail in a web page (webmail) or in a mail app on your phone or laptop. Mail apps read over IMAP, the standard that keeps the mail on the host’s server, so a message you read on your phone shows as read on your laptop too. They send through the host’s outgoing (SMTP) server, signing in with your address and a password.

To see who hosts your mail today, type your domain into any free online “MX lookup” page; searching for those two words finds several. In a terminal, dig +short MX yourstudio.com does the same. Each answer is a priority number and a server name, and the name often contains the host’s own. Every server listed can receive your mail, which is why the move below deletes the old ones.

Free here means no monthly charge for the mailbox. We read each named plan on its own page on 17 October 2026; plans change, so read them again on the day you sign up. Two more options, a suite trial and your own server, are not free for long; they are at the end.

Which to pick. One person starting out, replying to clients in a browser or on a phone: Zoho’s or Rasket’s free mailbox. Only need mail to arrive, and happy to reply from your old address: forwarding. Want Outlook or Apple Mail on your laptop: a hosting mailbox with IMAP, or a paid plan.

For reading, yes, if your new host offers IMAP. The Gmail app on Android, iPhone and iPad adds another account over IMAP, and so do Outlook and Apple Mail. Zoho’s free plan and Rasket Inbox’s free mailbox leave IMAP out, so they do not open in those apps; you use their own app or web page. Gmail on the web is ending its “Check mail from other accounts” (POP) fetch: Google’s help page says new users lost it after the first quarter of 2026 and existing users keep it until January 2027.

For replying as hello@yourstudio.com, Gmail’s “Send mail as” asks for your host’s outgoing (SMTP) server. A mailbox has one; forwarding does not, which is why forwarded replies leave from your old address.

Yes, with a shared mailbox: one address, one list of conversations, and everyone sees who replied. Forwarding support@ to two people gives each a copy and neither knows whether the other answered; an alias of one person’s mailbox leaves nobody to answer while they are away. Check whether a host counts a shared mailbox as a paid user. In Rasket Inbox a shared mailbox is one of your mailboxes, and its list can be narrowed to conversations assigned to you or to nobody, so two people do not answer the same client.

Free plans stop fitting when you need single sign-on, retention rules, audit logs, a way to recover a leaver’s mailbox, or someone to phone. Pick a host whose paid plans you could live with, so growing is a billing change rather than a move.

The order is the same whichever host you pick. The new host gives you the values; you copy them into wherever your domain’s DNS is managed. That is usually the registrar, or your web host or website builder if the domain’s nameservers point there. Never had mail on this domain? Skip the TTL, the watching and the rollback: create the mailbox, add the records the host gives you, and test. Budget a few minutes on day one to lower the TTL, under an hour on day two to create the addresses and swap the records, and a day of watching both hosts.

1. Lower the TTL a day ahead — The TTL (time to live) beside each DNS record is how many seconds other computers may remember the old answer. A day before the switch, or as long ahead as the TTL it shows now if that is longer, set it to 300 (five minutes) on your MX records, so most senders follow the change within minutes.
2. Create every address at the new host — Before you change anything, create each mailbox and alias you use today at the new host, or mark one mailbox as the catch-all (it receives mail for any address). Mail to an address the new host does not know is refused or not delivered.
3. Add the new host's sending records — SPF is the list of servers allowed to send for your domain, and DKIM is a signature that proves a message was not changed on the way; the new host gives you a value for each. Receivers trust mail that proves where it came from, and mail that cannot is more likely to land in spam. Add its DKIM record, and add the host to your existing SPF record rather than publishing a second one. For example, v=spf1 include:old-host.example ~all becomes v=spf1 include:old-host.example include:new-host.example ~all. An SPF check may make at most 10 DNS lookups, so keep the include: entries few.
4. Check the new host is ready — Wait until the new host's setup page shows each record verified and you can sign in to the new mailbox. Do not touch the MX records until both are true.
5. Swap the MX records, and keep a note — Write down the old MX values, then replace them with the new host's in one edit, deleting the old ones. An old MX left in place sends part of your mail to the old host. The note is your rollback.
6. Watch both hosts for a day, then tidy up — Keep the old mailbox open and check it until nothing new has arrived for a full day, then move the old mail across. Then remove the old host's include from your SPF record and its DKIM record.
7. Check for DMARC before adding one — DMARC is a record that tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM for your domain. In your DNS panel, look for a TXT record named _dmarc. If one exists, keep it and its policy and only add your report address to it, because a domain may have only one. If none exists, add one with the policy p=none and your own address for reports; at p=none receivers only send reports, and the DMARC guide linked below shows the record.
8. Add a second address — Add billing@ or support@ as an alias of the first mailbox (a second address that delivers into it), or as a shared mailbox if two people will answer it.

For the last step, our guide to which contact addresses to publish covers which addresses to create and which should be aliases. Leave DMARC at p=none until its reports list only senders you recognise; our guide to moving from p=none to p=reject covers the stricter settings and the exact record.

Send a message from the new address to a personal Gmail address of your own, and reply to it from there. If both arrive in the inbox rather than spam, the move worked. To be sure, open the message in Gmail on the web, choose the three-dot menu and Show original: DKIM and DMARC should read PASS for your domain. SPF often passes for your host’s domain rather than yours, which is fine while DMARC passes. If one fails, the usual cause is a missing or duplicated SPF record, a DKIM value pasted with a character missing, or a panel that added your domain twice to a record’s name. Our guide to DKIM, SPF and DMARC walks through each fix.

When all three pass, put the new address on your next invoice.