How to get a free business email hosting
In this post I’m going to show you how to get and configure a free email hosting for your domain. The only thing you need at this point is access to your domain DNS zone management. The rest is pretty easy.
There are plenty of free email hostings. Yandex offers you unlimited storage and unlimited email accounts, and that’s why it is one of the providers I usually choose.
First of all, navigate to https://connect.yandex.com/ and start the process by clicking “Try out”.
You will need a “yandex.com” email account. If you already have one, you can skip this step.
Once you log in or sign up, a popup will appear in order to create your business. See the following image:
So far so good. Now, you will see a new dashboard, much like Google’s “admin.google.com” dashboard. In that new page, you will have to navigate to the “Admin Tools” section.
In the Admin tools, you will have to create a domain for your business. This will give you some new DNS records that you will have to include in your DNS management zone.
The new page will list the domains assigned to your currently logged in user. If empty, just the button “Add domain” will be shown. Click it!
As I am assuming that you just bought your domain and you don’t have a website, the DNS record will be your only eligible method of verification. If not, just feel free to select any other method from the picture below. Here, I’m going to show you how to verify your domain with a DNS record. Click on the “DNS record” tab to see the needed info:
After adding a TXT record on your domain, click on the “Check” button and wait until it gets verified. When this is done, you will have to add at least two new DNS records, shown in the following image. Read below the instructions:
These records are for the following purposes:
- The CNAME record is optional, it will allow you to visit your webmail from “mail.yourdomain.com”.
- The MX record is mandatory and will allow you to send and receive emails for your domainl.
- The TXT record is mandatory and will add the SPF security layer to your domain, just allowing Yandex to send emails from your domain. If you are planning to send emails from your website server, you can add a “v=spf1 a redirect…” at the end of that record value. BE CAREFUL, as you see in the picture, the “=” sign has spaces after and before that shouldn’t be there.
When this is done, just refresh the page and you will find the confirmation message:
If you want to add an extra security layer (optional, buy highly recommendable), you should add a new TXT record in your DNS zone for the DKIM signature. See the following image for the instructions:
You have everything up and running! You just have to create new users (see the image below) or new departments. A department is an email which can hold a bunch of users of your business. Example: design@business.com will contain userA@business.com and userB@business.com.
I hope you enjoyed this guide!
