Set up an email address on your domain

Every hosting plan includes mail on your own domain, so you can use an address like [email protected] rather than a free webmail address. Here is how to create one and read it.

Create the address

Open your hosting service in the Goji dashboard and use the Email shortcut, which takes you straight to the mail section of the control panel. Create a new account, choose the part before the @, and set a password. The mailbox exists immediately.

How many addresses you can create depends on your plan — Starter includes one, and the larger plans include more. Your service page shows how many you have used.

Read your mail in a browser

Webmail is included and needs no setting up: sign in with the full email address as the username, and the password you just set. This is the fastest way to confirm a new mailbox works before you configure anything else.

Use it in Outlook, Gmail or on your phone

To collect the mail in a normal mail app you need the incoming and outgoing server settings, which the control panel displays for each mailbox. When you are offered the choice, prefer IMAP over POP3: IMAP keeps the mail on the server, so the same messages appear on your laptop and your phone and stay in step. POP3 downloads and removes them, which becomes annoying the moment you own two devices.

Getting your mail delivered

Mail from a brand-new domain is treated with suspicion by large providers until it has built up some history. Two things help more than anything else:

• Send from the real address. Mail claiming to be from your domain but sent through an unrelated service is exactly the pattern spam filters are built to catch.
• Publish an SPF record. It is a single DNS entry naming who is allowed to send for your domain, and without it a good proportion of your mail will land in junk folders. You can add it yourself under DNS management.

If a message you sent has not arrived, check the junk folder at the other end before assuming it was lost — mail from new domains almost always starts there.

A catch-all address

A catch-all collects anything sent to an address at your domain that does not exist, so a message to inof@ instead of info@ still reaches you. It is useful, and it also collects a certain amount of junk; most people turn it on, watch it for a month and then decide.