Hosting your email and your domain name together

A quick look at tradesmen’s or small businesses’ vans in the street shows that, while it’s now quite common to see own domain names used for business websites, it’s far less common to see them used for email. You’ll often see an online presence announced with an address such as https://www.my-plumbing-business.fr/ but with an email address such as my-plumbing-business@outlook.com, thus advertising another business after the @, in this case Microsoft. One of the consequences of this is the address’s long-term use; changing email provider means having to change address and inform all your contacts.¹

So why do we so often see people or organisations using their own domain name but not for email? First of all, that requires the average person, whether a sole proprietor, entrepreneur, etc., knowing the possibility exists.

And if they do, they then need to choose a provider, unless they manage the messaging server themselves. There are plenty, but that can be precisely the problem, all the more so as their offerings differ only slightly and no comparative tests have been conducted.

There’s also the problem of universal acceptance. I remember a government department expressing disbelief when I gave them the email address something@bortzmeyer.org, and asking for a “real address” (which, for them, no doubt meant a Gmail address).

How to combine email with your domain name?

As always, there are two options: do it yourself or outsource it. Let’s look first at the “do it yourself” option, although clearly this is aimed at large organisations and/or those with the necessary skills and motivation. If you don’t belong to either of these categories, you can skip the “Your own server” section below.

Your own server

Here we’re talking about managing your own messaging² server. From a purely technical point of view, it’s quite simple: there are plenty of ready-to-go software solutions, many of them with free licences. And there are innumerable online tutorials.³ However, even when you follow these tutorials, it can still be somewhat tricky. Particular attention needs to be paid to the configuration, if you want to avoid being put on operators’ blacklists.

Indeed, the proliferation of spam and phishing attacks means that email actors will not necessarily accept your email. They may reject it or they may give it a black mark in their filtering system, sending it to the “Junk” folder.⁴ The problem becomes even more critical if you want to send an email to a large number of addressees.⁵

Technical solutions do exist, many of them based on the DNS, such as SPF or DKIM. These do not present any particular difficultly for an IT systems administrator, but they do require a sound mastery of the email architecture. For example, with SPF you have to know all the machines that can send email using your domain name, which is by no means as easy as it sounds, especially when this list has to be kept up to date over time.

And then there’s the problem of incoming spam and how to filter it.

In short, hosting your own messaging server is possible, but you have to be prepared to devote time and human resources to it.

Using a provider

So the alternative is to use a provider to do the work for you. The list of potential providers is a long one, but – a word of warning – the offers are not identical, and it’s difficult to compare them, particularly as descriptions are not always clear.

For example, since email security is largely dependent on DNS-based protocols such as SPF and DKIM, some providers insist on hosting the domain name⁶ so as to be sure of making the right SPF and DKIM records.⁷ Others allow external hosting and will tell you which DNS records to enter in the DNS zone file.⁸ This is one of the points you need to look at when choosing a provider.

I do not intend to recommend (or advise against) any particular provider, simply to provide a partial list⁹ to show that there is no shortage of offerings.

• Fastmail
• Galae
• Galacsys
• Infomaniak
• LWS
• Mailbox
• Mailfence
• Mailo
• Migadu
• Ouvaton (there doesn’t seem to be any documentation on its website, but people are using it)
• OVH
• Protonmail
• Runbox
• Tuta

How should you choose? First of all there’s the price, of course (there doesn’t seem to be a free option), then the provider’s nationality in view of security and regulatory considerations among others, the type of provider (company, cooperative, non-profit, etc.), and the quality of the user interface, accessibility by standard protocols such as IMAP, etc.¹⁰ And of course, since the main reason for using your own domain name is removing dependency on email providers, you’ll need to know about the exit conditions.¹¹

Conclusion

In short, it’s perfectly possible to have an email address that uses your own domain name, without necessarily having to manage a messaging server. So there’s no reason why you can’t display your email address contact@my-plumbing-business.fr alongside the web address https://www.my-plumbing-business.fr/ on the side of your van.

And if you have an online registration form for people interested in your products, services or information, make sure you use universal acceptance to avoid certain addresses being rejected, as is all too often the case. A top-level domain such as .fr can perfectly well contain three components as in the example (secondary and sub-domains separated by a dot or a dash), or four or five or even more, and similarly the domain name in the email address after the @ can have just as many components.