Email on your own domain
Two different things get called this. Forwarding takes mail sent to you@yourdomain.com and delivers it to an inbox you already have — it is often free, takes one record, and is enough for a great many people. A mailbox is an actual account you send from as well as receive at, and it is a monthly per-user cost from an email provider. Both are configured with MX records at whoever runs your DNS, and both are completely independent of your website: changing your email setup does not touch your site, and moving your site does not touch your email. Of the registrars we track, Porkbun documents email forwarding among what it includes.
Forwarding versus a mailbox
The distinction that matters is whether you need to send mail from the address, not whether you need to receive it.
- Forwarding — mail to you@yourdomain.com lands in an inbox you already own. Usually free, trivial to set up, and invisible to the sender. What it does not give you is the ability to reply from that address convincingly.
- A mailbox — a real account with storage, sending, and the address on the outside of every message you send. Charged per user per month by an email provider.
- The usual mistake — paying for mailboxes for addresses nobody sends from. Aliases like hello@ or billing@ are forwarding problems, not mailbox problems.
The records, and where they go
Email routing is entirely separate from web routing. Your A or CNAME records point the website; your MX records point the mail. Changing one does not affect the other, which is why you can host a site anywhere and take email somewhere else.
- MX — names the mail servers that accept mail for your domain, with priorities. Your email provider publishes the exact values.
- SPF — a TXT record listing who is allowed to send as your domain
- DKIM — a TXT record carrying a key that signs your outgoing mail so recipients can verify it
- DMARC — a TXT record telling recipients what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM, and where to send reports
Receiving is easy; sending is the hard part
Getting mail to arrive takes one MX record and works almost immediately. Getting your outgoing mail into other people's inboxes rather than their spam folders is the part that takes care, and it is what SPF, DKIM and DMARC exist for.
Skip them and your mail is unauthenticated, which large providers increasingly treat as a reason to filter it. This is the single most common reason someone's shiny new domain email 'does not work' — it is being sent, and it is being binned.
Where to run it
Three arrangements, and the right one depends on whether you need to send.
- Registrar forwarding — the simplest, and free where offered. Porkbun documents email forwarding among what it includes; check the specific registrar rather than assuming, since not all offer it.
- A dedicated email provider — the normal answer when you need real mailboxes, calendars and shared addresses for a team
- Your web host's included mail — convenient and the arrangement most likely to cause trouble later, because it ties your email to a hosting decision you may want to reverse
Keep email portable
The reason to separate email from hosting is the same reason to separate the domain from hosting: it limits what any one dispute or outage can take from you. Email is the account-recovery channel for everything else you own, including the registrar account holding the domain.
Which produces one specific piece of advice worth following: do not use an address at the domain as that domain's own registrant contact and recovery address. If the domain lapses or its DNS breaks, the mailbox that would receive the warnings goes down with it.
Email on a custom domain comes in two forms. Forwarding delivers mail sent to an address at the domain into an existing inbox; it is frequently free and sufficient where sending from the address is not required — of the registrars tracked on this site, Porkbun documents email forwarding among its included features. A mailbox is a full account with sending, charged per user per month by an email provider. Both are configured via MX records at whichever provider runs the domain's DNS, and both are independent of website hosting: MX records route mail, A/CNAME records route the site, and changing one does not affect the other. Receiving requires only MX; reliable sending additionally requires SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, whose absence is the most common cause of outgoing mail being filtered. Do not use an address at the domain as that domain's own registrant and recovery contact, since a lapse or DNS failure takes down the mailbox that would receive the warnings.