Getting a Custom Email for your Custom Domain!
Introduction
Do you dislike your generic `@gmail.com` email? Or, do you want a more
memorable one? Well, whatever the reason, this tutorial is for you!
Let's get started!
What service should I use?
I'm going to assume throughout this tutorial that you have your domain and you want multiple email accounts registered for free. Multiple accounts are useful if you want mailing lists or automatic replies from a contact form.
There are lots of email services that you can use, but my tutorials are always going to be completely free which limits your options quite a lot.
The main options from when I did my research were Google and Yandex. However, although Google is generally more popular for the purpose of multiple users/accounts and price we're going to use Yandex. Also, if you want automatic emailing via SMPT on Replit, Google's lowest security is too high! You can not use Google SMTP on Replit.
Setting up a Yandex account
Yandex is a Russian company. It offers many services that are included in a Google account. Storage, mail, search, chat and more.
To get started, create a Yandex passport(account) at https://mail.yandex.com
Now that we have an account, it's time to create an organisation.
To do this, you need to go to https://admin.yandex.ru and sign in.
You may be greeted with a message that says their isn't an organisation connected with your account. Just press `Create new organisation`.
Accept the Terms of Use, and we can start setting up the custom domain.
Select Set up email on the sidebar and enter your domain.
Confirming Domain Ownership
In order to use the custom domain for your email address, you need to verify that the domain is yours.
There are three ways to verify the domain. You can add a TXT record to your DNS, add a HTML meta tag to your website, or upload a HTML file to your server.
You can use any of these, but it is best to use a DNS record.
Open your Cloudflare account and add a new TXT record with the content that
Yandex gave you. The Name or Target should be
@.
Click Verify Domain. It might take a while to update, so if it
doesn't work, just try pressing the button again.
Setting MX Records
Now, you need to set up an MX record that will point to Yandex's mail
servers. An MX record is a record that forwards emails with
@customdomain.tld to the account hosted on Yandex.
The Name/target should be @ with the server being
mx.yandex.net. Make the priority 10.
WARNING: If your MX record isn't verifying, make sure that the mail
server is pointing to mail.yandex.net. not
mail.yandex.net
Configuring DKIM + SPF Records
DKIM` Signatures and SPF Records help your messages not being seen as spam. SPF records aren't used very much, but it's good to put them as a TXT record instead.
DKIM and SPF records don't show that they've been setup correctly, so don't waste time wondering why it isn't telling you that it has been.
Configuring DMARC Record
This is most definitely *not* necessary, but it is useful. If a message
fails authentication, you want the recipient to know. Add this as a TXT
record with the name/target as @.
Content: v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:email@domain.tld
NOTE: Make sure to replace email@domain.tld with your
personal email!
Setting up Email Addresses
Now that the domain is ready, we can set up email addresses.
This is really simple! Just go over to the User tab and create
as many users as you'd like.
Also, you might have noticed that the organisation is just called
New Organisation. This is a little dull. If you go over to
Company Profile you can change it to whatever you want.