Business email — what a mailbox on your domain costs, and how to set it up

Business email is three things at once: an address on your own domain, a provider hosting the mailbox, and the DNS records that prove to a recipient that the message really came from your business. The price of one mailbox varies about ninefold between providers — from €0.90 to €8.10 per user a month, depending on where it lives (vendor price pages, read 2 October 2026; the upper figure is Google Workspace Business Starter with no annual commitment).

Two things matter more than price, though. First, whether your mail depends on the same server as your website — because then one outage takes down both channels a client might use to reach you. Second, whether Gmail will accept your messages at all. Since 1 February 2024, every sender writing to Gmail accounts, including a one-person business sending a handful of emails a day, has had to configure SPF or DKIM. Mail that works fine in your mail client but lacks those records doesn't meet Gmail's requirements for senders, even though everything looks correct from where you're sitting.

The order of decisions is therefore: first decide where the mailbox lives, then set up the DNS records, and only at the end think about when to move to a bigger plan.

How business email differs from a Gmail address

An address in business email belongs to a domain you control, not to the provider's domain. The mechanism is the MX record: a DNS entry on your domain that tells other mail servers where to deliver messages addressed to it (Google Workspace Help, Set up MX records, read 2.10.2026). You set the MX record yourself, at your domain registrar. Switching mail providers comes down to changing a DNS entry, and the address on your business cards, invoices, footer and business listing stays the same.

An address on @gmail.com or another provider's free domain works the other way round. The domain belongs to the provider, so switching providers means changing the address and notifying every client who has you in their contacts. A free mailbox is fine as a personal account, but it gives you no control over where your business mail ends up.

The second difference is about sending. In its Microsoft 365 documentation, Microsoft recommends that an organisation use its own domain for sending, "as it can enhance your email's appearance, improve its reputation and avoid limits designed to prevent misuse" (Microsoft Learn, Add a custom domain to Microsoft 365, read 2.10.2026). For a recipient to verify that a message from your domain really came from you, you need the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records described further down.

The third difference is dependency on the domain itself. If the domain lapses, mail stops working, usually without a grace period for how it resolves in DNS. The domain lifecycle, prices and renewal traps are in web hosting cost — there's no single EU-wide figure, but as an example a .com renews at €21.60 (Strato) to €31.98 (Gandi) a year. Point renewal reminders at an address outside that same domain. If they arrive at a mailbox on a domain that just expired, the channel they were meant to reach dies with it.

Where a mailbox can live: three options

A mailbox on your domain can be run by a hosting company, a mail-only provider, or an office suite — and each path has a different pricing model and a different failure mode. Entry prices below, read from vendor price pages on 2.10.2026.

Mail bundled with hosting

This is the cheapest route, because mail is usually included in the hosting package you're already paying for to run your site. We cover the drawbacks in web hosting cost. The most important: an outage takes down the site and the mail together. The second: mailboxes bundled this way are sometimes small enough that you pay extra after a year.

We don't quote a price for one mailbox in hosting, because hosts don't break it out — you pay for the whole package. The rule from that article settles the question without arithmetic: if client enquiries arrive by email, mail matters more than the site and shouldn't depend on the same machine.

A standalone mail provider

The second route is a provider that sells mail alone, with no cloud drive or document editor attached. A EUR-priced example is Zoho Mail (read 2.10.2026; "Local taxes (VAT, GST, etc.) will be charged in addition to the prices mentioned"):

• Mail Lite: €0.90 per user a month for 5 GB per mailbox, or €1.13 for 10 GB,
• Mail Premium: €3.60 per user a month, 50 GB of mail plus 50 GB of retention storage.

All three are billed annually only: the pricing table marks both Mail Lite variants "Yearly subscriptions only", and Mail Premium has "No monthly plan". A standalone provider's advantage is independence: the site and mail fail separately, and moving hosting leaves mailboxes untouched.

An office suite

The third route is a mailbox as part of a suite that also gives you file storage and video meetings:

• Google Workspace Business Starter: €6.80 per user a month with an annual commitment, or €8.10 on the flexible plan with no commitment (the page doesn't say whether VAT is included); both are billed monthly (Google Workspace pricing).
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: €6.07 with an annual commitment, or €7.28 billed monthly, excluding VAT (Microsoft 365 Business Basic, plan comparison). The EEA edition without Teams costs €4.67 with an annual commitment.

What else these suites include, how they count storage, and how commitment terms differ, is compared in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Here we're only interested in the mailbox.

What the price spread tells you

Taking the vendor prices above at face value (our own arithmetic): the cheapest mailbox, Zoho Mail Lite at €0.90, costs about a ninth of the most expensive, Google Workspace Starter at €8.10 with no commitment (8.10 ÷ 0.90 = 9). Even at the annual-commitment price, Google Workspace Starter (€6.80) costs about 12% more than Microsoft 365 Business Basic (€6.07) for a mailbox alone (6.80 ÷ 6.07 ≈ 1.12). Switching three mailboxes from Workspace Starter to Zoho Mail Lite would save €212.40 a year — (€6.80 − €0.90) × 3 mailboxes × 12 months (our arithmetic).

These numbers don't mean the cheapest mailbox always wins. Zoho Mail Lite is mail alone, while Workspace Starter is mail plus 30 GB of shared pooled storage and Meet for up to 100 participants. If you'll need those tools anyway, you're comparing two suites, not two mailboxes. If you only need an address on your domain, the price difference is real.

Free business email: what actually exists

A free business email address on your own domain exists, but with limits that rule out part of the market in practice. Zoho describes its Forever Free plan this way: "Email hosting for one domain for up to 5 users 5 GB Mail storage per user IMAP/ POP/ Active Sync not included" (Zoho Mail pricing, read 2.10.2026). In practice that means:

• one domain and at most five users, 5 GB per mailbox;
• no IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, so you can't connect it to Outlook or Apple Mail — only the browser and Zoho's own apps;
• a footnote reading "Available only in select data centers". Zoho doesn't name them, so whether the free plan is offered in its EU data centre is something you'd only find out at sign-up.

The other "free" routes are free in name only:

• Mail bundled with hosting is included in a paid package. You don't pay for the mailbox separately, but you pay for the package.
• Google Workspace's trial lasts 14 days and isn't a free plan. Google also requires you to verify domain ownership "within the first 9 days of your free trial period or when you start a paid contract"; without it, "your account will be automatically deleted within 21 days of signup", unless billing is set up with an active subscription (Google Workspace Help, Verify your domain, read 2.10.2026).
• An `@gmail.com` address is free, but it isn't an address on your own domain, so it gives you none of the advantages described above.

If you want Gmail's interface with an address on your own domain, the paid route Google's own pricing describes is Google Workspace.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC: the three records Gmail won't trust mail without

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are three DNS entries on your domain that let a recipient's server check whether a message signed with your address really came from you. Each has its own RFC standard at the RFC Editor (read 2.10.2026):

• SPF — RFC 7208 from April 2014. The domain owner lists the servers allowed to send mail on its behalf, and the recipient's server checks whether a message arrived from one of them.
• DKIM — RFC 6376 from September 2011. The sending server signs the message cryptographically, and the recipient verifies the signature with a public key fetched directly from the sender's domain's DNS.
• DMARC — RFC 9989 from May 2026, which obsoletes the earlier RFC 7489. DMARC lets a domain owner state how a recipient should treat messages that fail verification, and request reports on who is sending mail as that domain. Reporting itself is described in separate RFCs 9990 and 9991, also from May 2026.

If you find a guide that cites RFC 7489 as the current description of DMARC, it's relying on a document that, since May 2026, is obsoleted.

What Gmail requires from every sender

Google states it plainly in its sender guidelines: "Starting February 1, 2024, all email senders who send email to Gmail accounts must meet the requirements in this section" (Google Workspace Help, sender guidelines, read 2.10.2026). The first of those requirements is: "Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your sending domains." The rest cover valid PTR records, a TLS connection, a spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%, and message formatting that complies with RFC 5322. The requirements concern mail sent to personal Gmail accounts — "an account that ends in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com" — and if you sign with DKIM, "sending to personal Gmail accounts requires a DKIM key of 1024 bits or longer".

For a small business, the takeaway is simple: even one person sending offers needs at least SPF or DKIM. Google goes further in its recommendation: "we recommend that you always set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your domains".

When all three become mandatory

The full set becomes mandatory for bulk senders. Requirements at the largest mailboxes look like this:

Sources: Gmail, Yahoo Sender Best Practices and Outlook postmaster, read 2.10.2026. Outlook's page doesn't state a spam-complaint threshold, so none is quoted here.

The 5,000-messages-a-day threshold rarely applies to a small business's everyday correspondence. It starts to matter once you send a newsletter or bulk notifications from the same domain.

How to set up business email, step by step

You set up business email in a fixed order: domain and provider first, then users, and only at the end the records that switch over and authenticate mail. The order comes from Google's and Microsoft's own documentation, and has one purpose: so that no messages are lost mid-switch. The exact values go in your provider's own dashboard, so what follows describes what each step does, not what to type in a field.

1. Confirm the domain is under your control. The registrar account should be set up in your name or your business's name, and you need access to DNS settings. If someone else registered the domain, every mail change will need their involvement.
2. Choose a provider and verify domain ownership. Google, among other methods, verifies it with a TXT record; "adding your Google Workspace verification record takes about 10 minutes", and the time until it becomes active depends on your domain host (answer/60216). Microsoft accepts DNS records or a verification file uploaded to the site.
3. Create users before changing the MX record. Microsoft recommends adding users after adding the domain, but before adding the MX record, because that "ensures that email continues to work without interruption as the email moves from the previous email provider to Microsoft 365" (Microsoft Learn).
4. Switch the MX record. From this point incoming mail goes to the new provider. Google tells you to remove any other MX records, because "your email might not work correctly if you keep old or incorrect MX records", and warns that "it can take up to 72 hours for the new MX records to be recognized" (answer/140034).
5. Add SPF — the list of servers allowed to send mail from your domain. If you also send from other systems, such as invoicing software or a shop, they need to be on it too.
6. Turn on DKIM in your provider's dashboard and publish the public key it generates in DNS.
7. Add DMARC with a `p=none` policy. Yahoo requires bulk senders to use at least a p=none policy, so it's a sensible starting point. The reports the record requests will show who's sending mail on behalf of your domain before you move to a stricter policy.
8. Send a test message to a Gmail mailbox and check it lands in the inbox, not spam.

Automatic DNS configuration

Some of the work in steps 2–6 can be done for you by the provider itself, but only with certain registrars. Microsoft 365 supports the Domain Connect standard: if your registrar supports it, Microsoft 365 "automatically handles the following tasks: Confirming domain ownership. Adding DNS records required for Microsoft 365 services" (Microsoft Learn, read 2.10.2026). If your registrar doesn't support Domain Connect, you confirm ownership and add the records manually.

Google's MX-record help tells you to add the MX record at your domain registrar, and gives separate instructions for several popular registrars, including Cloudflare, cPanel, GoDaddy, Hostinger, IONOS and Namecheap, plus general instructions for all other registrars.

The admin account

Whoever holds the mail admin account decides everything about every mailbox in the company: creates them, resets passwords, and can delete them. The admin account should belong to the business owner, not the person who helped set things up, and should have two-factor authentication turned on. Why protecting company data starts with the mailbox, not the website, is explained in protecting company data.

Mailboxes, users and capacity

In office suites you pay per user, not per domain. Both Google and Microsoft quote prices "per user" a month, and Microsoft 365 Business and Google Workspace Business share the same cap: up to 300 users on business plans.

Capacity is counted differently:

• Google Workspace Business Starter: "Business Starter includes 30 GB of pooled storage per user" — one shared pool, not a separate limit per mailbox.
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic and Standard: the mailbox has "100 GB primary and 50 GB archive storage per user", with OneDrive getting a separate 1 TB per user.
• Zoho Mail Lite: 5 GB or 10 GB per mailbox, depending on the variant chosen.

A hosted mailbox's capacity is whatever the hosting package sets, so check it in the hosting price list before you buy rather than assuming it's enough.

A separate question is addresses that don't need their own person, such as info@, billing@ or sales@. An alias is an additional address that delivers mail to an existing mailbox. Before buying another user seat just to have a billing address, check with your provider whether an alias is enough. Alias limits differ between plans, so check the specific plan's documentation.

When to move your mail to a bigger plan

You move mail to a bigger plan once it stops being only about mail. The signal is a second person in the business, a shared calendar, files you're working on together, or clients sending documents you need to edit in their format. At that point you're choosing a suite, not a mailbox, and the decision is better made from the comparison in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

A second signal is bulk sending. A newsletter or a series of client notifications can bring you closer to the 5,000-messages-a-day threshold above which Gmail and Outlook require the full SPF, DKIM and DMARC set plus an easy unsubscribe. How to prepare for that kind of send is in email marketing.

A third signal is a site migration. If mail sits with a separate provider, changing hosting doesn't touch mailboxes, because the MX records point to the mail provider, not the site's server. If mail is bundled with hosting, moving the site means moving mail too, with every step described above.

Mail is one of the first purchases a new business makes, alongside a domain and a name. What to buy in week zero, and what can wait until the first client or employee, is gathered in technology for a new business.