Once your site is about to go live, we'll start talking to you about your email requirements.

If your website contains forms, like a contact form or a booking form, we will need to set up a domain email for you.

What's a domain email?

Domain email is based on your website domain, or name: If you're site is www.mikesbikes.com your domain email will be something like info@mikebikes.com. It doesn't have to be info; it can whatever you want.

We have two options for domain email...

1. Standard "Control Panel". This is free with all hosting packages. For details go here.
2. Office 365 Enterprise-level email. This is a service supplied by a partner, not us, and costs about £3 per inbox per month. For details go here.

If you opt for option 2: Office 365 email, our partner will be in touch to get you set up. If you opt for option 1: Control Panel email we will send you the inbox settings that you can use to have most devices send and receive your emails for you.

Control Panel Email Settings

Getting your device to connect to your Control Panel email isn't too tricky, you must be precise with the settings and type in them correctly, but it's not too hard. Sadly though, due to vested interests in getting you to use their email services, the like of Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) will make you just thru some hoops before you can successfully get either of these devices to connect to your mailbox.

** Why do they do this? ** Because they'd rather you use their email service, like Gmail for Google and.Cloud for Apple.

Thanks to this, adding your domain-based email to your smartphone is no longer the easiest thing in the world.

Don't panic, though, there are loads of websites and videos dedicated to helping you overcome this issue, and of course, we are always on hand to help. There is another option, though, and it's one we recommend...

Connect a Gmail account to your domain email.

To learn how to do it check out the other FAQ Gmail tab. For the background to this, read on.

If you have opted for a Control Panel email inbox, you will only have 100mg of storage space, which if you leave lots of emails in your inbox or receive large attachments can soon fill up. So we often suggest connecting a Gmail account to your domain inbox.

The three main benefits…

1. Gmail is super easy to add to any device
2. Gmail archives all old emails
3. Mail sent via Gmail is less likely to get tagged as spam

We have a video in the Gmail FAQ to show precisely how to connect your email to Gmail, but before you get to that stage, there are a few things to consider/do...

1. Set up a dedicated Gmail email account. You might already have a Gmail account, and if you want to use this it's okay, remember that emails you reply to will come from the Gmail account, not your domain email address, so it's often better to set up a dedicated Gmail account. In the example used above, mikesbikes.com, you could set up a Gmail account in the name mikesbikes@gmail.com.
2. Add this new (or existing) Gmail account to your device. Adding Gmail to most devices is super easy; select Gmail as the option in your email app and follow the instructions.
3. Once you have the Gmail accounted added to your devices, watch the video below about connecting Gmail to your domain email, and that's it, job done.

How it works…

Once it's all set up every 30 mins or so Gmail will go to your domain email inbox and check for messages. If there are any there, it will fetch them and bring them into your Gmail inbox. You then read and reply as you wish. Replies sent will not come from your domain email account but the Gmail account.

What this means in real terms is someone sending an email to info@mikesbikes.com will get a reply from mikesbikes@gmail.com. But don't worry about this. Fact is, most of the time people never actually see the underlying email nowadays and providing you set up the account to mimic the domain name (mikesbikes in this example) people will know who it's from.

The fact is many many businesses, large and small, do things this way. We do it this way, so you're in good company!