My blog (shorts) is currently hosted on a custom domain
raivivek.in
. Because I have this domain, I'd like to be able to get emails sent to
hello@raivivek.in
for example. This has the advantage that I can have unlimited email
aliases and separate inboxes depending on which email I use for what purpose.
For instance, using marketing-
for all promotional and marketing emails.
However, just owning the domain is not enough. You have to setup a service which will receive emails at the address. There are many ways to do it. You can purchase an account at one of the many email hosting providers (hey ProtonMail!) which will give you an inbox and let you receive emails sent to custom domain. Because such services are generally not free, I chose to forward those emails to my Gmail account. And of course, you'd also like to be able to send emails from your custom domain address.
Previously I was using mailgun which provided such services and a free tier that was sufficient for me. After they changed their plans, I searched for different options and two free options that looked best were: ImprovMX and ForwardMail.
Both services offer free forwarding services. Setting up them is easy as well. Create
a free account and add the corresponding MX
and TXT
records in your DNS settings. I use Cloudflare
to manage DNS so that was quite painless.
Happy hacking!