Guides

Email at your own domain, whatever hosts your website

An address like hello@yourdomain.com looks more professional than a Gmail address, and it's yours even if you change email provider. Your website and your email don't need to live in the same place: the domain can point to one company for the website and another for email, and usually should.

Why keep email separate from your website host

Email is its own craft: keeping spam out of your inbox, and keeping your messages out of other people's spam folders. Companies that only do email do it better than website hosts that bundle a mailbox. Keeping them separate also means you can change one without touching the other. Pagehaus doesn't host email for this reason.

Two kinds of email at your domain

• Forwarding: mail to hello@yourdomain.com arrives in the inbox you already have, such as Gmail. Often free (Cloudflare Email Routing, ImprovMX and others). Replying from your own address usually needs extra setup or a paid plan, so replies may come from your Gmail address.
• A mailbox: a real inbox at your domain, sending and receiving as hello@yourdomain.com, on your phone and computer. From a few dollars per person per month: Zoho Mail, Fastmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Proton Mail and iCloud+ all offer it.

For a small business, a mailbox is worth it: replies come from the same address, and you can add orders@ or a colleague later. For a personal site, forwarding is often enough.

The DNS records involved

Your email provider gives you the exact values; you add them where your domain's DNS is managed (your registrar, or a DNS service like Cloudflare).

• MX records tell the world which servers receive mail for your domain. This is the record that makes email work.
• SPF, a TXT record starting with v=spf1, lists who may send email as your domain. A domain can have only one: if two services need to be in it, combine them into one record.
• DKIM, one or two TXT or CNAME records, lets receivers check that mail really came from your provider.
• DMARC, a TXT record at _dmarc, tells receivers what to do with mail that fails those checks. Start with v=DMARC1; p=none and tighten it later.

Without SPF, DKIM and DMARC, your messages are more likely to land in spam, and Gmail and Yahoo now expect them from senders. Most providers have a setup page that checks each record for you.

Website and email on the same domain

They use different records, so they don't get in each other's way:

Two things to watch:

• Don't delete records you don't recognise when connecting your website. Changing where the website points never needs the MX or TXT records to change.
• No CNAME on the root domain (yourdomain.com) unless your DNS provider offers "CNAME flattening": a plain CNAME there can't coexist with MX records and breaks email. Use A records for the root, as most hosts ask.

With a Pagehaus website

1. Set up email first with the provider you chose, and send yourself a test message.
2. Connect your domain to Pagehaus: A records for the root, a CNAME for www, and one TXT record that proves the domain is yours. None of them touch your email records.
3. Send your contact form messages to your new address, so everything arrives in one place.

Pagehaus never sends email as your domain (form messages come from our own address, with Reply-To set to your visitor), so you don't need to add anything for Pagehaus to your SPF record.