Business email belongs on your own domain

Plenty of businesses run on an address like [email protected] or [email protected]. It was free, it took five minutes to set up, and it has worked ever since. Most owners have never had a reason to question it. There are a few things about that setup worth knowing.

The address belongs to whoever created it

A free email account belongs to a person, not a business. Often it was set up years ago by whoever was handy, with their own phone number and recovery details. If that person leaves, retires, or falls out with the company, the business can lose access to its own email address. We’ve seen owners locked out of the account their customers, suppliers, and bank all write to. There was no support line to call and no way to prove to Google or Microsoft that the business should get it back.

An address on your own domain works the other way around. The business owns the domain, the mailboxes hang off it, and people can come and go without taking the email with them.

One account has no controls

When the business grows past one person, the free account becomes a bigger problem. The password gets shared. It ends up on a sticky note, in a group chat, and with people who left the company years ago. There is no way to require multi-factor authentication for everyone who uses it, no way to tell which person signed in from where, and no way to cut off one person without changing the password for all of them.

Hosted email gives each person their own sign-in and lets you require multi-factor authentication for everyone. When someone leaves, you turn off their sign-in that day instead of changing a shared password for the whole office. The mail they handled stays with the business.

Anyone can pretend to be you

Nothing stops someone from registering [email protected], or a near-identical misspelling, and emailing your customers an invoice with new banking details. This is how payment redirect fraud usually works. With a free address, your customers have no reliable way to tell your real emails from fake ones.

Your own domain can publish verification records that let receiving mail systems check a message genuinely came from your business. Owning the domain doesn’t publish these records by itself, so if your business already has its own email, it’s worth confirming they’re in place. With your own domain, you can also tell customers that real email from you always comes from @yourbusiness.ca. That’s easy for them to check. With a free address it doesn’t work, because anyone can sign up for one that looks like yours.

Business records in a personal account

The mail in that account is the business’s paper trail. Quotes, approvals, invoices, the thread where a customer agreed to the change order. In a free personal account, those records sit outside the business’s control, can’t be centrally backed up, and leave when the person with the password leaves. We covered where business data should live in a recent post, and email usually holds most of it.

Hosted mailboxes can be properly backed up, retained, searched, and handed to a new staff member when a role changes hands. Shared addresses like info@ or bookings@ can be proper shared mailboxes that several people work from with their own logins.

What moving over looks like

Hosted business email is a service like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, set up on a domain your business owns. It costs less than ten dollars per person per month.

Moving over doesn’t take long. We set up the domain, bring across your existing email and contacts, and keep the old address working for a while so nothing gets missed. While we’re at it, we set up the verification records, multi-factor authentication, and backups. This is work we do regularly as part of managed IT.

If your business uses a free email address today, it’s worth planning the move. Talk to us and we can walk through what it would look like for your business.