What is an email domain?

An email domain is everything after the @ sign in an email address. In hello@yourbakery.co.uk, the email domain is yourbakery.co.uk, the same domain your bakery's website can use. Free email services put their own domain there instead, which is why a personal Gmail address ends in @gmail.com.

The parts of an email address

Your bakery's address, hello@yourbakery.co.uk, has three parts:

• The username, hello: the part before the @ sign, which you choose for each address.
• The @ sign, which separates the username from the domain.
• The domain, yourbakery.co.uk: the name you registered, followed by the domain extension .co.uk. Every address you create on the domain ends with that same domain name.

Look after the @ in your own address and you'll find your email domain. It isn't the same thing as an email address: the domain is the name you registered, and each address is one username on it, so a single domain can carry several addresses, as many as your email plan allows.

Free email domains and your own domain

A free email domain is the email provider's own domain. When you create a personal Gmail account, for example, your address ends in @gmail.com, whatever username you pick. With your own domain, the part after the @ is a name you've registered yourself, and you decide which addresses to create on it.

Why use a branded email domain

An address on your own domain shows customers straight away which business they're writing to: hello@yourbakery.co.uk is clearly the bakery, while yourbakery@gmail.com could belong to anyone. You can give each job its own address on the same domain, such as orders@ for orders and hello@ for questions. If you ever move your email to another provider, you keep the same address, because the domain goes with you.

How to choose an email domain

Build your email domain name from your business name, so customers connect the address with you. Then check three more things:

• It's short enough to remember and type without mistakes. Numbers, hyphens and extra words usually get in the way.
• It's still available. Search for it before you settle on it, and try another domain extension if it's taken.
• It still fits as the business grows, so avoid a name that's too narrow or tied to a trend.

Our advice: if most of your customers are in the UK, choose a .co.uk for your email domain, a well-established ending for UK businesses. If you sell abroad as well, register the .com too, so nobody else can take it.

The difference between an email address and an alias

A normal email address is a mailbox: it has its own inbox and login, and you read and send email from it. With our email, an alias has none of these. It forwards the messages sent to it to one or more mailboxes you pick, and you can't send email from it.

For example, you could work from hello@yourbakery.co.uk and set up orders@yourbakery.co.uk as an alias, so every email sent to orders@ lands in the hello@ inbox. Aliases are handy when one person covers several roles, or when you need an address you can publish for a while and delete later.

How to get an email domain

You need two things for email on your own domain: a domain and an email plan. With us, you set up your own email domain in this order:

1. Choose an email plan, based on how many email accounts and how much storage you need.
2. Choose the domain for your email, which is included free for the first year.
3. Create the email addresses you want in the control panel.
4. Start using your email in our Webmail, or connect the account to another app.

The help centre shows how to create the email addresses.

If you already have a domain with another provider, you can transfer it to us, add an email plan and create your addresses on it. If your domain uses another provider's name servers instead of ours, for example because your website is built with Wix, WordPress or Squarespace, you can still send and receive email through our email server. In that case, you set our MX record in the DNS settings at that provider, in place of any other MX record, and add our SPF and DKIM records there too, because a domain's DNS records are set where its name servers are. The help centre shows how to set up the email records with external name servers.

You don't need a website to have email on your own domain. If you want one later, you can upgrade to a hosting plan.

Email on your own domain, with webmail, a calendar and spam and virus protection.

Can you get an email domain for free?

Not your own. A free address from a service like Gmail always ends in the provider's domain. For an address on your own domain, you pay for the domain and for an email plan.

With one of our email plans, the domain is free for the first year, and after that you pay to renew it once a year. Keep it renewed: when a domain expires, the services on it stop working, your website and email included.

Do you need to warm up a new email domain?

Warming up is advice for when you plan to send newsletters or other bulk email from a new domain. Warming up a domain means sending a little email from it at first and more over time, and Google's email sender guidelines advise bulk senders to do just that: begin with a small volume sent to engaged recipients and raise it slowly, without sudden spikes. For the bakery, that means sending the first newsletters to the customers who signed up for them, and growing from there.

Once you've picked a name for the bakery, check that the domain is available and register it together with an email plan, so you can set up hello@ straight away.