The first thing a customer sees before they even read your message is the address it came from. An info@yourbusiness.gr says there is a business behind the email. A yourbusiness1985@gmail.com says something else, and it is not what you want. Professional email is one of the cheapest things you can do for your image, and one of the most commonly neglected.
Why gmail.com is costing you
Trust is the obvious part. A quote from an address carrying the company name reads differently from the same quote sent from a free email. The same goes for invoices, proposals and the first contact after a Google search.
Then there is the practical part: control. When a colleague leaves, giorgos.company@gmail.com leaves with them, along with all the customer correspondence. On your own domain, the mailbox belongs to the business; you close it, forward it or hand it to the next person. And there is deliverability: messages from free addresses to many recipients end up in spam more and more often.
The three options
Email that comes with your hosting
If your site is hosted on a server with cPanel, email is usually part of the package. You create as many addresses as you like on your domain, read them from webmail, Outlook or your phone via IMAP, and the storage is shared with the site. In our hosting plans email is included, with SpamExperts filtering spam before the message even reaches the mailbox. It is the solution for most small businesses: it costs nothing extra and covers anything from one to dozens of mailboxes.
Google Workspace
Gmail on your own domain, together with Drive, Calendar and Meet. You pay per user per month, a few euros for the basic plan, and you get the environment everyone knows, with excellent search and great collaboration on documents. It suits teams that work a lot on shared files or want email independent from the site’s hosting.
Microsoft 365
The Microsoft equivalent, with Outlook, Teams and the Office apps. The natural choice for offices that live in Excel and Word and for businesses that already run a Windows infrastructure.
The criterion is simple. If your email is mainly communication with customers and suppliers, hosting email is more than enough. If your team needs shared documents, calendars and video calls under the same account, go for Workspace or 365. In both cases the domain and the site can stay exactly where they are.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC: the three acronyms that keep you out of spam
This is where most professional email goes wrong. A domain can have a perfect mailbox and its messages still land in junk, because three records are missing from the DNS.
SPF tells recipients which servers are allowed to send email on behalf of your domain. DKIM digitally signs every message so the recipient knows it was not altered on the way. DMARC says what to do with messages that fail the previous two checks. Since 2024 Google and Yahoo require them from anyone sending in bulk, and in practice they weigh them for everyone. If you send newsletters or invoices from your domain and do not know what these three are, someone needs to look at them today.
The setup, step by step
First the domain: if you do not have one, you register it, and .gr remains the strongest choice for a Greek business. Then the MX records in DNS, which tell the whole internet where email for your domain is delivered. Next the mailboxes, with sensible naming from the start: name@ for people, info@ and sales@ for roles, so the business is not tied to one person. Then connecting your phone and computer via IMAP, so what is read shows as read everywhere. And finally, a signature with the business details, the same for everyone.
Mistakes we see often
Newsletters going out from the regular mailbox to hundreds of recipients, with the result that the whole domain gets flagged as spam. One shared password for everyone. Mailboxes with no storage limit that fill up the disk and bring the site down with them. And the most expensive one: no backup. A business’s email is its archive. If your hosting does not keep copies of the email too, ask why.
What it costs
With hosting email, nothing beyond the hosting plan you already pay for. With Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, a few euros per user per month. The setup, when done by someone who has done it before, is a few hours of work, once. Compared to one lost quote that went to spam, it is the cheapest thing you will buy this year.
Want us to set up or migrate your email to your own domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC from the start? Contact us.
