How to make an email address from your own domain
If you have your own domain, or are considering purchasing one, why not create an email address that uses your own domain? Think of how much better it will look to clients or potential employers to have yourname@yourdomain.com instead of your gmail or other email. You’ll appear more professional, and in most cases, it’s easy and FREE!
- If you haven’t already purchased your domain, think about the name you want. If you have, skip to step 3. This part is not free, but usually only about $10–15 (USD). You can use your first name and last name (e.g. jillsmith.com), but if that’s taken, consider .ca (if say, you live in Canada), or .co, .io, .tech, or .codes. Pick something appropriate to your career.
- Most domains will include at least one free email address. Try these (hover, dreamhost or iwantmyname), and remember, they’re usually cheaper if you pay for the long-term package! Your domain name and Ideally choose a host that uses cpanel because it’s easy to use.
- Once you’ve got your domain, log into your blog hosting control panel, a.k.a. “cpanel.” You’ll probably need your username and password to log in. They should be the ones already associated with your account. Your username might be the part of your new email address before the @ (e.g. jillsmith) or it may be the same username you used to register your domain (e.g. Jill Smith).
- Click on Mail or Email and then Email Accounts. There should be a button that says Create New Email. Fill out all your information, or if you have a password manager (such as LastPass), you can create a form filler so you don’t have to manually type all that in.
- Forward it to your main email account. I used dreamhost to create my email address and it even had a section where you can enter an email address for forwarding (see below). But if you don’t have that forwarding box, you’ll need to go back to cpanel under the Mail section and look for Forward or Forwarder. Fill out all of your details and submit.
- Rejoice! Now that you have your own domain-specific email address, it might be a good time to set up your gmail email signature (see below) so everyone you email can see your new website and professional email address.
To set up your gmail email signature, open up gmail in your browser and click on the settings icon directly below your profile picture in the top right of your screen. Click on Settings from the drop down menu, then scroll down to Signature. You can add your job title under your name (e.g. Jill Smith, Web Developer), then a link to your new email (e.g. jill@jillsmith.com), and you can change the fonts and colours to your liking.
You can even add social media icons! You just have to download pngs for the social media you want represented (e.g. the bird logo from Twitter) and then click the image icon and upload your social media icons.
You can then select the icons (or your website in the example below) and then click the link icon to make it a clickable link. Just paste in the url and you’re good to go!
