Business email on your own domain, set up so it actually arrives

Why it matters

When you send a quotation, the recipient decides something about you before reading it. An address on your own domain says the business is established. A Gmail or Yahoo address says maybe, and for procurement officers and NGOs it sometimes ends the conversation.

It also protects you. An address on your own domain belongs to the business, not to whoever created it. Staff leave. Personal Gmail accounts leave with them, together with the customer history in the inbox.

Your options, and what they cost

Free email with your hosting. Most hosting plans include mailboxes. It costs nothing extra, and it is the weakest option: small storage, basic spam filtering, an awkward webmail, and delivery problems that are hard to diagnose. It works for low volume.

Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Around UGX 25,000 to 45,000 per user per month depending on the plan. You get the mail app everyone already knows, good spam filtering, proper storage, and calendars and files that work together. For a business that lives in email, this is usually the right answer.

Zoho Mail sits in between. It is cheaper than the big two and has a free tier for a small number of users on one domain. Many small businesses here start there.

One piece of practical advice: keep email away from your website hosting where you can. If they share a server, a website problem takes your mail down with it, and a move becomes two migrations at once.

The three records that decide whether mail arrives

SPF says which servers are allowed to send mail using your domain. Without it, receiving systems are suspicious of everything you send.

DKIM signs each message so the receiver can confirm it really came from you and was not changed on the way.

DMARC tells receiving systems what to do when a message fails those checks, and can email you a report about who is sending as you.

These are DNS records at your registrar, and your email provider gives you the exact values to paste in. It is a fifteen minute job. Skipping it is why so many small business emails land in spam, and why some never arrive at all. If you have ever heard "I did not get your email", check these first.

Addresses, and a common mistake

Keep it simple and predictable: info@ or hello@ for general enquiries, sales@, and firstname@ for people. Avoid clever addresses nobody can guess.

Use aliases rather than paying for a mailbox nobody reads. accounts@ and support@ can both deliver into one inbox at no extra cost.

And here is the mistake that quietly breaks website forms. Your contact form should not send email pretending to come from the visitor's address. Send it from your own domain and put the visitor's address in the reply-to field. Mail that claims to be from somebody else fails the checks above and gets dropped.

Make sure form mail actually reaches you

Website contact forms use the server's own mail by default, and that mail is frequently rejected or filed as spam without any warning to you. The form says "thank you" and the enquiry disappears.

Fix it by sending form mail through a proper mail service - an SMTP plugin connected to your email provider or a sending service. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the single most valuable thing most business sites are missing.

Then test all of it. Send a message through every form on the site, from a phone that is not connected to your office, and confirm it arrives in the inbox and not in spam. Do this again after any change to hosting, email or the site.