How To Create Your Own Email Domain
If you’re looking for the best way to create your own email domain, then I strongly suggest you keep reading because I am going to share with you my experience and lessons learned from having my own email domain for over seven years. In addition to the lessons learned that I share below in this article, I will give you the blue print I used to create my own domain email that works well and works consistently at the absolutely best possible price–free with a domain purchase at InternetDirectSolutions.com.
Until I created this system I was paying $29.99 a year for the email service used with my domain. This was in addition to the yearly cost of my domain. Once I found out I could create my own reseller account and get free domain email with my domain purchase, I figured other people would want this also. After thinking about this for a while I went ahead and created a domain reseller account and configured it to give free domain email with a domain purchase. In addition, I know a lot of people are struggling with the current economy so I also configured my reseller account to give as many free extras as possible when someone purchases a domain from me. In addition to the free email service with a domain purchase, you will also get free hosting with website builder for a five page website, a starter web page, a free photo album, and more, worth over $141.00. Click here to look at the entire list. I encourage you to look around on the internet for a better deal. (If you find one, please let me know.) I don’t think you will. If you are in a hurry click here now to go to the 3 Step Guide that will give you the complete blue print I used to create my own free domain email or keep reading to hear the rest of my story.
My Story
I purchased my first custom domain name for my own email in 2004. After six years, I switched to a different custom domain name for a number of reasons. In this article, I am going to tell you why I switched and what lessons I learned over the years that will help you get the most out of your own email domain and hopefully save you the hundreds of dollars and the more than 100 hours in research and “redos” that learning them have cost me.
Why I Switched Domains & Hosting Services
The first custom domain name I purchased was http://ThisIsThePlace.info. This name had a special meaning to my ancestors, so I bought it to remind me of my roots. I kept this domain for about six years before changing hosting service and my custom domain name.
I changed my custom email domain for three reasons:
1. I wanted to have a shorter email address for texting and tweeting.
2. I found I didn’t need anywhere near the 2GB of space my paid email plan had. I was paying $29.88 a year for my email in addition to the yearly domain cost. While this isn’t a lot, I discovered that if I set up my own domain re-seller account, I had the option to offer a free email plan and a bunch of other free stuff — like a free five page starter website, free photo album, and more worth over $141.00 with any domain purchase. Since I didn’t need the 2GB of space that came with my paid email plan, I figured I might as well do this and offer this same service to others to help them save money as well.
3. . I learned through trial and error that there are numbers of online services that do not recognize the .info extension I was using for my custom email domain as a valid email extension. This wasn’t a big deal, but I do like to protect my privacy by using a unique email address for almost every online account I create or online newsletter I sign up for. The free email service you receive when you buy a domain at the re-seller account I set up at InternetDirectSolutions.com has an option called “catch-all” email. This option is also referred to wild card email, alias email, virtual email and all email, but they all mean the same thing—you can make up any prefix you want for your email address and it will be delivered to your real email address associated with your domain. Using this feature, you can make up any prefix on the fly and you will receive it. For example, AnythingYouWantHere@MyCustomDomainName.com.
None of these reasons by themselves were a big deal, but after a few years of thinking about changing, I took the plunge and changed over. I did run both custom email domains for a year to make sure I got all my online accounts switched over. I have now used my free email account with my new domain name for over a year with only one small glitch which I will tell you in the “lessons learned” section below.
How To Create Your Own Email Domain:
Once you understand how to create your own email domain, it is really quite easy. What I am going to share with you here will save you the hours in setup time that it took me to figure out this system. I thank God for helping me get this to work, and for the amount of time and frustration it has saved me over the years, once I got this working.
If you are ready to get your own email domain just Click Here to go to the 3-Step Guide.This guide will walk you through on how to choose your domain, purchase your domain name, and create your email account and show you how to forward your custom domain to your regular email if you choose to do so.
I have learned a number of lessons over the years that you may find useful:
1. The shorter the domain name you purchase, the better when it comes to texting, tweeting and just typing your email in for websites, etc.
About 10 years ago, I did an exhaustive amount of research about the shortest domain you could purchase. At that time, pretty much every combination of four and five letters and numbers domains had been bought up and people were just holding onto them. Back then, you were lucky if you could find a random 5 character domain that made no sense at all. However, last year when I bought the most recent domain name, there were enough four character domains available that I was able to get one with two of my initials in it. It appears that the poor economy has not only affected real-estate, but also the availability of short domains. A recent search even turned up a number of three character domains available for registration as well. One really nice feature with having your own domain email, that I use all the time, is a one letter email address. This makes for a very short email address when combined with a three character domain.
If you are serious about purchasing a three character domain name, contact me at ThreeCharacterDomains [@] dnh7 dot org.
2. Remember, not all extensions are created equal.
I have hundreds of web accounts from PayPal to Amazon, to three different conference calling accounts. My original custom domain with the .info extension worked when signing up for almost all my online accounts and newsletters. However, there were a number of sites that wouldn’t take the .info extension as a valid email format. Therefore, you may want to consider staying with the .net, .com or .org extensions.
3. Forwarding your email to one account makes life easier.
I have my custom email forwarded to my Gmail account, so I have all my emails in one place. I have a number of hobby blog sites like this one, with a small amount of traffic on them. I use a made-up email address on these sites based on my custom domain email. The made-up custom domain-based email addresses works well when sending out messages from my websites. However, if someone replies to one of these made-up addresses, the reply ends up in my Gmail inbox. There are several ways around this. Gmail has a feature called ’Send mail as’. You can access this feature from the Gmail settings and add any address to send from. Once the additional address is added, you will have a drop-down menu when composing an email. You will be able to select your sending email address from this drop-down box. Since your custom email is already forwarded to Gmail, when Gmail sends the confirmation email to prove you own the added email address, it comes directly to your Gmail account. With this configuration, adding one of your made-up address can take about a minute and is very easy.
4. Create an alias in Gmail when corresponding with help desks, etc.
Another similar problem you may encounter when using a made-up wild card email address is that if you make a purchase online and you need to confirm some information for billing or to contact the help desk, there have been a few times that the help desk wanted my response to come from the email I signed up with. In most cases when I sign up for an online account, I am using a made-up email where the first part is the email name before the @ sign, is the name of the website. When this happens it is very easy to add the made-up wild card email address to your “send mail as” alias list in Gmail as discussed in the above paragraph.
5. Don’t let your inbox fill up.
If you forward your free custom email account to your Gmail account, there is one lesson I learned which you will want to watch out for. After almost a year of running my free email account, I stopped getting my emails forwarded to my Gmail account. After some investigation, I found out that I had filled up the allotted memory for my free email account, and it stopped receiving emails. After deleting all the emails in my free account (I of course still had the copies in Gmail), emails sent to my custom domain email began forwarding to Gmail again just fine. Keeping an eye on this is important because if you email box is full, any emails sent to your full email box will “bounce” and you will not receive them. Depending on how much email you receive, you may want to purge your free mail account monthly or at least quarterly to make sure you don’t use up all your allotted memory, like I did after a year. Of course, you can always upgrade to a paid email account to get more email storage space. After that first glitch, everything has been fine. I just clear out my custom email account periodically.
6. Turn off your spam filter.
It took me a while to figure this one out, but if you forward your custom domain email to another email account like Gmail, you may want to turn off the spam filter in your custom domain email account. By turning off the spam filter in the custom domain email, you let your primary email spam filter weed out the real spam. If you leave the spam filter on in the custom email account, it may stop a legitimate email you were expecting and then you will have to log into your custom email domain client and check the spam folder. By turning off the spam filter in my custom domain email, my Gmail account spam filter can still filter these incoming messages and there is no need to filter the messages twice.
7. Find a good custom domain name provider.
The domain re-seller/hosting account I created to get my free email account with my domain purchase is InternetDirectSolutions.com. They have 24/7 customer support and I have never had any problems with their hosting. I have tried a number of different hosting services over the years. The one I used before I created the InternetDirectSolutions.com re-seller account was purchased by another company. Once they were purchased, the great customer service they had, changed. I put up with this for a while, as I liked their control panel and other features. However, the last straw was when one of the domains I had configured in the control panel to not automatically renew (because I didn’t want it anymore) was renewed and of course my credit card was charged. Another hosting service I tried prior to that said, they could install a script I purchased, but the script apparently wasn’t installed properly and I could never reach anyone on the phone for support. This was a three hundred dollar mistake as I purchased two years of hosting and then got stuck with a script I couldn’t use and no way to contact anyone to cancel or get it fixed. This hosting company, by the way, was one of the major hosting companies you see on almost every review for hosting and so I trusted them. I later learned why they are recommended by so many people, because they are paying them big commissions for referring you to them. Trusting these review sites was a big mistake on my part. That’s another reason I created my own re-seller site so other people don’t have to have the same problems I had, like this. You will always been able to reach a customer service rep 24/7 for my InternetDirectSolutions.com re-seller service.
8. Never buy a domain name over the phone.
The only problem I had with the help desk service I used for my re-seller account at InternetDirectSolutions.com was when I purchased a domain over the phone one time. The person on the phone apparently didn’t understand what I said and spelled the domain name wrong. I just had to laugh and chalk it up to another lesson learned. I never buy my domains over the phone now; I always use the online domain search form at InternetDirectSolutions.com to check for domain availability and purchase my domains.
Now that I have shared with you the lessons I’ve learned over the last 7 years, in my next post, I am going to share with you my Step by Step Guide to getting your own email domain.
P.S. One more thing. I’m sure you could figure out how to do all of this on your own if you wanted to. I did, but it cost me hundreds of dollars in lessons learned and over 100 hours when you calculate the time researching domain and hosting services, and trying out different configurations for my domains and email service to figure out what works consistently and predictably.
You can invest your time and money figuring this out on your own, if you want, or you can follow my 3-step guide and get something that works. To get started with your own custom email domain, click here now.
