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How do I change my email address without changing the underlying provider?
I tried to do a quick search and can't find an example of exactly what I want to do. I want to keep my email provider but change how it "looks" or said in another way, change the address itself. The reason for that is that I ditched Google to a lesser known email provider but I hate having to spell out my address to everyone because they don't know about said provider.
My idea would be to create something like myname@personal.com. Is there a name for what I want to do? Is it possible?
Thanks.
I'm trying to set up a custom domain for my email yes. And you are right, my email provider supports custom domains and has instructions on how to set it up.
Now the question is: what is a good custom domain? The name part is easy, but the part after @ is tricky. In my country we don't speak English but I also deal with foreigners. That's why I came up with the @personal because it seemed simple, but maybe you guys have better ideas.
I recommend something yo can use professionally. Something based on your last name for example.
In any instance don’t worry too much, once you own the domain it’s trivial to set up a new one if you ever change your mind. You’ll just end up with two emails going to the same mailbox.
There's also the
.nametop-level domain specifically for domains that relate to natural persons. I'm quite happy with firstname@lastname.name as my email address.You can use that, but in my experience, anything beyond .com, .org and .edu only confuses people. Especially in the real world where you have to verbally tell people your email address.
"So that's firstname@lastname.name.com?" is a common response.
I just went with .org because it's cheap, sounds official and people understand it.
I once used a firstname@middlelastname.email address, and it was fine most of the time but boy did I regret that decision the first time I had to get phone technical support. They were absolutely convinced that I just had no idea how emails work - you don't need a dot email at the end!
You need to buy a domain with a registrar like NameCheap. Then your email provider should have a guide on how to set up your domain, it is just pasting the right values in the DNS settings of your domain registrar, but if you haven't done this before it sounds more intimidating than it actually is. Or you can just look for a tutorial if your email provider and domain registrar are well known.
Keep in mind that not all email providers support custom domains.
The details of setting this up are going to depend on your email provider so you should check their support pages first. Sometimes they charge more for a custom domain.
An alternative is email forwarding, but that's more complex and you would need a way to set your From: address to the forwarded email address without raising red flags that might result in your outgoing email getting filtered as spam.
Which one? Do you know if it supports custom domains?
Either way, step one is to acquire your own domain name. Check here.
Step 2 will be to set up the DNS MX configuration of that domain to point to your email provider. How to do that depends on where you purchased your domain name (your "registrar"), and which email provider you're using.
There is no step 3.
I've had good experiences with Zoho mail. You can use your own domain and have Zoho handle the email side.