I recently wrote about owning your own domain. This is the natural follow-up.
So you took the advice. You bought yourname.com. You turned it on, clicked some buttons, poked around. It doesn’t feel very professional yet. You have a lot to learn. That’s fine, here’s what you can do today.
You already spent ten or twelve dollars on the domain. Next step: make it your email address.
There are a few ways to do this. The easiest is Office 365. Twelve bucks a month gets you an Exchange Online mailbox. Point your domain to Microsoft, set up email, and now you’re sending from [email protected]. That’s it. That’s the move.
If you really want to learn, and you have a spare machine lying around, you can install your own mail server and tunnel it through something like Cloudflare. I’m going to be honest. I don’t suggest hosting your own mail server if you’re just starting out.
Actually, I’m not sure I suggest hosting your own mail server if you’ve been doing this for over thirty years.
Exchange Online is twelve bucks.
But here’s the point: once you have [email protected], it becomes your brand. And that brand carries more weight as your career grows. Every email you send is a small professional signal. [email protected] says something different than [email protected].
Your domain is your home on the internet. Your email is how people find the front door.