You’ve Got Mail: WPMU DEV Hosting, now with Free Email!
You asked for it, and we’ve delivered. Every WPMU DEV hosting account now comes with 5 free email accounts.
There’s not even postage required. While we’ve had email forwarding for some time, you asked us for regular free at your domain email, like name@domain.tld, that your users and clients could hook up to Outlook, Apple Mail or their favorite email client.
Well, our awesome developers have packaged it all up for us and now we’re letting email out of its (in)box.
This article covers what’s included, how it works, and everything you need to know to set up your new free email accounts.
Creating Fresh New Email Accounts
So just to reiterate, each site hosted with us comes with 5 free email addresses that you can create right in The Hub 2.0 with just a few clicks.
And then easily configure using our DNS manager (you can expect that to be automated in the very near future too).
Here’s how it’s done.
Screenshots in the tutorial below are from our new Hub 2.0 interface. Our Hosting interface will be upgraded to Hub 2.0 shortly. Check out the new Hub 2.0 features here:
First, from the Hub, select the domain that you’d like to add email to. Then, you’ll click Hosting > Emails.
From this point, click on Add Email Account.
Once you click on Add Email Account, you’ll be prompted to enter an Email and a Password.
We generate some very secure, but slightly odd, passwords for you 🙂
When it is successfully created, you’ll get access to all required DNS records, which includes the name, type (e.g. MX), host, and value.
Which you can simply add to your preferred DNS provider (yet another hint if you didn’t get it the first time: use us to make it super, super easy)
All of your created email accounts will now appear in the Emails area and can be accessed at any time.
Configuring Your Email Client
Once you’ve created your email you’ll want to add it to your email client of choice.
To help you out we’ve a bunch of guides for all the popular email clients that you can find here.
Specifically, here’s how to set your new free email accounts up with:
- Apple Mail (same applies for your iPhone mail app)
- Outlook.com (same applies to regular Outlook)
- Gmail
- Thunderbird
- And plenty more documentation on the way…
And, of course, if you get stuck then you can just chat with our friendly 24/7 live expert support who will help you until you are sorted.
Free Email Hosting vs Forwarding
If you need to be able to receive emails from your custom domains, another way of doing that is by email forwarding. Which we’ve allowed you to do with an unlimited number of emails for some time 🙂 In fact it’s what I’ve been doing with all my hobby sites.
Email forwarding is basically re-sending emails received by one email address to another email address.
It works great with email providers like Gmail, so say if I want to send email from nate@mydomain.com I can forward that to nates.email@gmail.com and then configure Gmail to ‘send as’ nate@mydomain.com… easy, quick and effective.
However, it does not let you log into nate@mydomain.com using outlook or your iphone mail app.
Whereas these new free email accounts do.
Any restrictions?
Basically, no 🙂
We don’t provide web mail with these accounts (I mean honestly, as much as we love them in principle, who actually uses Horde?) so you’ll have to use your own client and there’s a limit to 25MB of what we’ll keep on the server.
But other than that, you’re good to go. No holds barred.
Or Should I Use Professional Email?
As discussed (and as I’m sure you already knew), email comes in many flavors.
For most of us (and our clients and users), these free email accounts and forwarding email will do the job.
But if you’re looking for a more feature rich and industrial strength email solution you should consider a third party provider like G Suite or Zoho (and if you are a charity or a non-profit then you almost certainly should consider G Suite for non-profits as it’s free!)
These solutions basically ramp up your ability to send lots of emails, host lots of accounts, increase deliverability and, of course, provide you with a bunch of other tools.
But, as I mentioned, for the majority of us we hope our free email hosting and forwarding tools will do the job!
Also, with this being Hosting Month, we’re giving away 10K worth of Dev credits, so be sure to enter our giveaway at the end of this article!
And as mentioned in the article, we have 24/7 support, documentation, and any help you may need along the way.
So, put those stamps away. You won’t be needing them here. We’ll deliver (postage free) with our hosting and using email with your domain.