A business still emailing customers from a free address is losing work it never hears about. Not always, and not with everybody, but consistently enough that fixing it is one of the cheapest improvements available.
It costs a few pounds a month. Here is how to do it properly, once.
Why it matters more than it seems
Three reasons, in ascending order of importance.
Perception. UK buyers read a free address as a signal about size and permanence, and they read it particularly strongly when spending money or choosing a supplier for the first time.
Deliverability. You cannot properly authenticate mail from a domain you do not control. That means no SPF or DKIM alignment of your own, and progressively worse treatment by receiving mail systems that have tightened their standards considerably. The mechanics are in this article.
Ownership. This is the real one. An address on a domain you own is yours. You can move provider, add staff, keep addresses when people leave and retain the correspondence. An address on somebody else's domain belongs to whoever holds the account, and businesses have genuinely lost their entire mail history to a forgotten recovery question.
What you need
Two things, and they are separate.
A domain name. £10 to £15 a year. Register it in the business's name, with a business email address as the contact and set it to auto-renew. Domain expiry is one of the most avoidable disasters in small business IT and it happens several times a year to somebody.
A mail service. Microsoft 365 Business Basic at roughly £5 to £7 per user per month is the standard answer for a UK business, and it includes Teams, 1TB of storage and the web versions of the Office applications alongside a proper 50GB mailbox.
Cheaper mail-only options exist from domain registrars. They are usually a false economy — limited storage, weak spam filtering and no route to grow into.
.co.uk or .com
For a business trading primarily in the UK, .co.uk is well understood and often available where the .com is not. There is no evidence of a search penalty and it signals a UK business, which for a local customer is a benefit rather than a limitation.
If both are available, take both and redirect one. If you trade internationally, lead with .com.
Avoid the newer novelty extensions for email. They are still treated with suspicion by some spam filters and by a lot of customers.
Which addresses to create
One personal address per person — firstname@ works for most businesses under fifty people.
Then the shared addresses for functions that outlive individuals:
- enquiries@ or hello@ — the address on your website and your vehicles
- accounts@ — invoices and payments
- support@ — only if you actually offer support
Set these up as shared mailboxes, not as forwards to an individual. Shared mailboxes under 50GB need no licence, everybody sees the same inbox and the same replies, and the correspondence survives the person leaving. The difference matters and is explained in this article.
Resist creating twelve departmental addresses on day one. Each unmonitored address is a place enquiries go to die.
Getting the setup right
Six steps, in order:
- Register the domain in the business's name with auto-renew on.
- Set up the mail service and verify the domain, which uses a TXT record and does not affect anything yet.
- Create the mailboxes and shared addresses.
- Import your existing mail rather than starting fresh. This takes an hour now and is very difficult later.
- Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Not optional in 2026 — this is what keeps your mail out of junk folders.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for every account before anybody starts using it.
Step five is the one most often skipped by people setting this up themselves, and it is why a proportion of new business domains land in spam from day one.
The order matters. Verify, create, import, authenticate, secure. Changing the mail records before the mailboxes exist is the classic way to lose a day of enquiries.
What people forget
Everything else that sends as you. Your website's contact form, your invoicing software, your booking system. Each needs to be listed in SPF or it starts failing.
Where the old address was used. Directory listings, Google Business Profile, social profiles, your accountant, your bank, your insurers. Keep the old address collecting for six months and work through the list as things arrive.
Backup. Microsoft does not back up your mailbox in the way most people assume, and setting this up at the start is easier than retrofitting it. The reasoning is in this article.
What it costs, all in
For a three-person business: about £15 to £20 a month for mail, £12 a year for the domain and a few pounds a month for backup. Under £300 a year, including file storage and Teams.
Against that, one enquiry a year that would otherwise have gone elsewhere covers it several times over.
If you would like it set up correctly first time, with the authentication records published properly and the security configured before anyone logs in, that is a routine job for our managed IT team and it takes an afternoon. Get in touch.
