To get business email on your own domain you need three things: a domain you control, a mail provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or the mailbox that comes with your Irish hosting), and four DNS records added at your registrar so that mail is delivered and trusted. It takes an afternoon and costs a few euro per mailbox per month. After that, hello@yourshop.ie works on your phone exactly the way Gmail did, and every quote you send carries your business name instead of a free provider’s.
This guide explains why that matters, compares the three routes, decodes the DNS records in one line each, and covers the part everyone forgets: keeping the old address alive while customers catch up.
Why hello@yourshop.ie beats a Gmail address
A customer getting two quotes for a bathroom sees one from a plumber at a gmail.com address and one from mick@mickbyrneplumbing.ie. Both plumbers might be equally good, but one of them looks like a business that will still be there when the warranty question comes up. That first impression is the main reason to do this, and it costs less than a coffee a week.
The second reason is ownership. When a staff member leaves, you keep the mailbox, the customer threads and the quotes. When they were using their own Gmail or Hotmail, all of that walks out the door with them, and you may have no record of what was promised to whom.
The third is tidiness. hello@, bookings@, accounts@ and your own name can all land in one inbox or be split up as the business grows. Your website, your Google Business Profile and your invoices all show the same domain, which is a small trust signal to people and to Google alike.
There is a GDPR angle too. Customer details sitting in a personal account you cannot control or close are hard to square with the obligations in GDPR and cookies for small business websites in Ireland. A business mailbox you administer is much easier to defend.
First, own the domain
Email lives on your domain, so you need one registered in your own name, not your designer’s, and you need the login for the registrar. If you have a .ie already, check the registrar account works before you buy anything. If you have not got one yet, how to register a .ie domain walks through the .IE registry’s connection-to-Ireland rule and the Irish registrars (Blacknight, Register365, LetsHost and Hosting Ireland among them). If you are weighing up the two endings, we have compared .ie vs .com for an Irish business separately.
The three ways to get it
| Route | Best suited to | What you get beyond email | Rough cost per mailbox |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Workspace | Anyone who already lives in Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive | Shared calendars, Drive storage, Meet video calls, Docs and Sheets | Roughly €6 to €8 a month |
| Microsoft 365 Business | Offices that run on Outlook, Word and Excel, accountants and solicitors especially | Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, the Office apps on the dearer tiers | Roughly €5 to €7 a month for the basic tier |
| Mailbox from your hosting company or registrar | A sole trader who wants one or two addresses and nothing else | Webmail and IMAP access, sometimes a basic calendar | Roughly €1 to €4 a month, sometimes bundled with hosting |
Prices change, and both Google and Microsoft have raised theirs more than once. Treat the ranges as a guide and check the Irish pricing page before you decide.
Our view for a typical shop or trade: Google Workspace if you use an Android phone or already have Google Calendar on the counter, Microsoft 365 if your accountant sends you Excel files every week and you want Outlook, and a hosting mailbox if you send a dozen emails a month and want the cheapest thing that works. The hosting mailbox is fine for light use. Its spam filtering and search are usually weaker, which you notice once the inbox passes a few thousand messages.
The four DNS records, one line each
When you sign up, the provider hands you a short list of records to add at your registrar. These are what they do.
- MX tells the world’s mail servers where to deliver anything addressed to your domain.
- SPF is a list of the servers allowed to send mail on behalf of your domain, so a scammer’s server fails the check.
- DKIM stamps each outgoing message with a signature that proves it came from you and was not altered on the way.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with a message that fails SPF or DKIM (deliver, quarantine or reject) and sends you reports about who is sending as you.
You add them in the DNS section of your registrar’s control panel, or wherever your nameservers point if a developer moved them to Cloudflare or a host. Copy and paste, do not retype. Changes can take a few hours to reach every mail server, so do this in the evening rather than the morning of a big quote.
The big receivers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) have tightened their rules in recent years, and mail from a domain without SPF and DKIM is far more likely to land in spam or be refused outright. Set all four up on day one, even if the provider marks DMARC as optional.
Setting it up on your phone
Most owners do their email standing up, so the phone matters more than the laptop.
With Google Workspace, open the Gmail app, add an account, choose Google and sign in with the new address. Everything else is automatic. With Microsoft 365, the Outlook app does the same, and Apple Mail on an iPhone can add a Microsoft 365 account directly too. With a hosting mailbox, choose “Other” or “IMAP” in the mail app and type in the server names your host gave you. Pick IMAP rather than POP so that your phone and your laptop show the same messages and the same read status.
Set a signature while you are at it: your name, the business name, the mobile number, the website and, if you have premises, the address with the Eircode. People copy details out of signatures far more often than you would think.
Keeping the old address alive
Nobody updates their contacts the day you change address, so the old one has to keep working for a good while.
Turn on forwarding in the old Gmail or Hotmail account so anything sent there arrives in the new inbox. Add an auto-reply that gives the new address in one line. Then work through the places the old address is printed or stored: your website contact page, the Google Business Profile, invoices and quote templates, your bank and your accountant, Revenue’s online service, supplier accounts, Facebook and Instagram bios, and the sticker on the van.
Keep the old account open for at least a year and log in every month or two, because some supplier will still be sending statements to it. Do not delete it. A deleted free address can sometimes be registered again by someone else, and then your old customers are emailing a stranger.
Mistakes we see most
The domain was registered by a web designer who has moved on, so nobody can get into the registrar to add records. Fix this before anything else, and if the website is tied up in the same account, how to move your website to a new provider covers getting control back.
A catch-all address was set up so that anything@yourdomain.ie arrives, and within a year it is nothing but spam. Create the addresses you need and let the rest bounce.
Two-step sign-in was skipped because it felt like a nuisance. A business mailbox holds customer details and the password resets for every other service you use, so it is the one account that most needs it.
What we do for clients
Both of our plans start with a .ie domain registered in your own name, so the foundation for email is there from day one. The Essentials plan, at €499 to set up and €50 a month, covers the site and the domain but not the mailboxes. The Complete plan, at €1,499 and €100 a month, includes business email on your domain: we set up the mailboxes, add the records, get it working on your phone and check that a test message reaches a Gmail inbox cleanly.
If you only want the email and already have a site elsewhere, we will point you at one of the three routes above and tell you which fits, because it is not a hard job and you may not need us for it. The full comparison of what each plan includes is on the pricing page.
Set up email on your own domain: the steps
- Make sure you control the domain. Check the domain is registered in your name or your company's name and that you can log in to the registrar. Without that login you cannot add the records email needs.
- Pick a provider. Choose Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or the mailbox your hosting company offers, based on the apps you already use and how many people need an address.
- Create the mailboxes. Set up one address per person plus a shared one such as hello@ or bookings@. Use strong passwords and turn on two-step sign-in from the first day.
- Add the DNS records. Copy the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records from the provider into the DNS page at your registrar. They can take a few hours to take effect everywhere.
- Set up your phone and laptop. Add the account in the mail app you already use. Send a message to a friend's Gmail address and check it lands in the inbox, not the spam folder.
- Forward the old address and tell people. Turn on forwarding from the old Gmail or Hotmail account, set a short auto-reply, and update Google, your invoices, your website and your social profiles.