Free custom email domain alternative to Outlook.com and Google Apps

In the past, Google and Microsoft offered free support for custom email domains. You can configure Google Apps to use a custom domain name you own for email, and Microsoft offers the same functionality first on Hotmail.com, then on Outlook.com as well.

The two companies canceled the free option with Google ending Google Apps last year and Microsoft recently ending support for custom email domains on Outlook.com.

It allowed you to set up personalized email addresses using email services made available by businesses. Instead of being [email protected], you can run email addresses such as [email protected] for example, which makes sense especially in a commercial environment.

Google and Microsoft support custom email domains, but only in paid products. Google Apps for Business costs $ 5 per month per user while Microsoft’s lowest tier plan, Exchange Online Package 1, is available for $ 4 per user.

Free alternative

If you don’t want to pay monthly fees for custom email domains, you can use alternatives to Google Apps and Outlook.com that let you do that.

Zoho Mail is available as a free plan that supports up to five users and one domain. While this is not sufficient for large businesses, it may be sufficient for smaller ones.

When it comes to features, you get 5 gigabytes of email storage per user and 5 gigabytes of shared document storage on top of that.

The free plan supports the majority of features of Zoho’s paid plans, including IMAP and POP3 access, Dropbox integration, policy management, push messaging (MS Exchange ActiveSync), built-in calendar, Tasks apps and Notes and a global address book.

What you don’t get are Google Calendar sync, email storage upgrades, multi-domain hosting, custom logo or branding, and custom URLs, as well as several features of document management.

You can consult the detailed comparison here.

Put in place

The installer walks you through a series of somewhat technical steps.

• Enter the domain name for which you would like email support for using Zoho Mail.
• On the next page, add the first email address (this is the login email address), a password, and a confirmation email address.
• You need to verify domain ownership in the next step by using DNS verification or uploading a small file to your server.
• In the last step, it is necessary to modify the MX records of the domain. To do this, you need to open the domain control panel on the hosting company’s website. Zoho has instructions for several popular registrars on this support page. If you know your way, make the following changes:

It can take up to 48 hours for new recordings to propagate, but it usually happens much faster than that.

And that’s all there is to it. If you want to use an external client, use the following settings:

Pop3

Incoming server name: pop.zoho.com
Harbor: 995
Require SSL: Yes

Outgoing server name: smtp.zoho.com
Harbor: 465
Require SSL: Yes
Authentication Required: Yes

IMAP

Incoming server name: imap.zoho.com
Harbor: 993
Require SSL: Yes

Outgoing server name: smtp.zoho.com
Harbor: 465
Require SSL: Yes
Authentication Required: Yes

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