How to get a business email on your company's own domain, step by step

What a business email is, and why a free address is a risk

A business email is an address on your company's own domain, such as ahmed@yourcompany.com, instead of a free Gmail or Hotmail account. To get one, you register the domain in the company's name, choose a service to hold the mailboxes, create the addresses your team needs, point the domain's DNS records at that service, move the old mail across, and connect Outlook and the phones. None of it needs you to be technical, but each step has a decision in it.

A free address costs nothing, and the trouble shows up later. A free account belongs to whoever opened it: it sits under one person's login and recovers through their phone number. If that person leaves on bad terms, forgets the password or gets the account locked, the company can lose the address printed on its invoices and every business card. Nor can the address move to another provider, because the part after the @ belongs to Google or Microsoft. An address on your own domain belongs to the company, and it can move to any mail service without a single card being reprinted.

Step 1: own the domain, registered to the company

Everything starts with the domain, the part after the @. Check who it is registered to. It should be the company itself, with a company contact address, not a web designer, a former employee or the owner's personal account. ICANN, the body that coordinates domains such as .com, explains that a domain is yours for the period you registered it, and you have to renew it to keep the website and email that depend on it. A domain left to lapse can be lost for a short time or for good, and the mail on it goes with it.

So set the domain to renew automatically and keep the login to the registrar (the company you bought the domain from) in the company's hands. That login is where the mail records in step 4 will be changed. If you have no domain yet, choose a short one that is easy to spell over the phone; it will carry your website too.

Step 2: choose where the mail lives

The mailboxes themselves live on a mail service, and a company has three sound choices. The right one depends on how your team already works.

Microsoft 365 pairs a custom business email on Exchange with the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and Teams on the plans that include it. It suits a company whose people already live in Outlook and Office files.

Google Workspace gives each person a custom business email in Gmail, at you@your-company.com, with video meetings and storage shared across the organisation. It suits a team that already works in Gmail and Google Docs. Both Microsoft and Google charge per user per month.

grommunio is open-source groupware that its makers describe as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Outlook connects to it the way it connects to Exchange, with mail, calendars, contacts and shared mailboxes, but without Microsoft's server or its licences. BudTech is an official grommunio partner: we host it for you on a monthly plan by the number of mailboxes, or install it on a server you own, so the mail sits on equipment you control, the idea behind Own Your Data. On your own server you pay a grommunio subscription per user, and the server is billed separately. It suits a company that wants Outlook without Microsoft's licences.

We set up and manage all three, from Muscat, in person in Oman and remotely anywhere in the GCC, so the choice can follow your business. The plans and prices are on our business email hosting page.

Step 3: create the mailboxes and the shared addresses

The mailboxes are created on the new service before anything else changes. Microsoft's own guide says to add users and set up mailboxes before you update the MX record, so mail keeps working during the move. Plan two kinds of address:

• Personal mailboxes, one per person, in one pattern for everyone: ahmed@yourcompany.com, or ahmed.k@yourcompany.com when two people share a first name. Choose the pattern once, because changing it later means new business cards.
• Shared addresses for roles: info@ for enquiries, accounts@ for invoices and payments, sales@ for quotes, and support@ or careers@ where they fit. When someone is on leave or leaves the company, the mail still reaches whoever covers the role.

Give each person their own login: when someone leaves, you close or hand over one mailbox, and nobody else is affected.

Step 4: point the domain at the mail service

This step makes the new mailboxes receive mail. It happens in the domain's DNS settings, and it is the step most worth leaving to someone who has done it before. Four records do the work:

• MX tells the world where your mail goes. As Google puts it, the sender's computer looks up the MX records for your domain to figure out where to deliver. Once it changes, new mail arrives at the new service; old mail stays in the old account until it is copied (step 5).
• SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain. A domain keeps one SPF record, so a new service is added to the existing one.
• DKIM signs each message so the receiving server can check that it really came from you.
• DMARC tells other mail servers what to do with mail that fails those checks, and can send you reports on who is using your name.

The last three are not extras. Google's sender guidelines require everyone who sends to Gmail accounts to set up SPF or DKIM, and recommend all three (as published by Google, read on 27 October 2026). Without them your genuine mail is more likely to land in spam, and it is easier for a scammer to send mail that looks like yours. Our guide to business email security explains them further.

Step 5: move the old mail across

New mail goes to the new mailboxes as soon as the MX record changes, but the years of mail in the old account have to be copied. For mail and folders we use imapsync, which copies from one IMAP mailbox to another and can be stopped and restarted without creating duplicates. It works from any provider that offers IMAP, Gmail and Microsoft 365 included.

The order matters: everything is copied once before the switch, then the MX record changes, then a final pass runs afterwards. grommunio's migration guide explains why: while the old MX record is still cached, some mail keeps arriving at the old provider. So the old mailboxes stay open until that last pass is done. How long the move takes depends on how many mailboxes there are and how much mail sits in them, which is why the switch is planned for a quiet time.

Calendars and contacts travel separately, because IMAP carries mail only; imapsync's own page says plainly that it cannot move them. They come across as a PST export from the classic desktop Outlook, or as calendar and contact files from other services.

A free address cannot come with you, because it belongs to Google or Microsoft. Copy its mail across, then turn on automatic forwarding in Gmail or Outlook.com, so anything still sent there reaches the new mailbox while customers update their contacts.

Step 6: set up Outlook and the phones

Each person's computer and phone is connected to the new mailbox, and the old account is removed so nobody replies from it out of habit.

On Microsoft 365 and grommunio, Outlook can usually find its own settings from the email address and password, through an autodiscover record in DNS that Microsoft describes as allowing automatic configuration of email in products such as Outlook. With grommunio, Outlook for Windows connects natively over MAPI over HTTP, and Outlook for Mac over EWS, with no plugin. That is classic Outlook for Windows, the desktop app in Office and Microsoft 365. In Microsoft's newer Outlook for Windows, even Microsoft's own on-premises Exchange is supported only over IMAP, with limited features (as published by Microsoft, read on 27 October 2026), so we set grommunio up in classic Outlook. On phones, grommunio works with the mail app already on an iPhone or Android phone: add a new account, choose "Microsoft Exchange" as the account type, and mail, calendar and contacts sync over Exchange ActiveSync. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace have their own phone apps and setup steps.

Finish with a test: send a message to each address from an outside account, reply from a phone, and check that a meeting invitation lands in the calendar. Then write down where everything lives (the registrar, the DNS, the mail service and its admin login) and keep it with the company, not with one person. These are the steps we follow in every business email hosting setup, for three mailboxes or a hundred.