How to Add a Custom Email Domain to Your Gmail for Free

If you’re a solopreneur running a small business (like me), you’ve probably started out with a free email account through Google’s Gmail. At some point you’ll likely purchase a website domain and want to upgrade your Gmail to a custom web domain, but without paying extra. I ran into this situation and it was surprisingly hard to find a simple guide on how I could create a custom email domain without purchasing Google Workspace or some other fancy application. After piecing together a few YouTube videos, I figured it out. So I created this short guide to explain what you need to do.

Below is the best video tutorial I have found to date. Although some of the information is outdated so I recommend you follow my guide instead. Oh, and if you need help setting up your website, I can do that too.

Step 1: Enable Email Forwarding for Your Domain

The first step is to go to your domain registrar and set up email forwarding rules. The above video tutorial uses Namecheap whereas I use Cloudflare. It will be slightly different for each platform but for the purposes of this tutorial I will be going through Cloudflare only.

After signing into your Cloudflare account, select the “Domains” dropdown on the left side menu and select the “Registrations” option. This will open a list of all domains that you have registered in your Cloudflare account.

Once on the domain overview page, click the three dots in the same row as the domain you want to use for your professional email. Then select the “Configure DNS” option. In this tutorial, I will be using my domain wcwebdesign.com.

After you select the Configure DNS option you may be a little overwhelmed with the amount of options on your screen. Especially if you’re new to using Cloudflare. All you need to do is look for the “Email” dropdown on the left side of your screen. After clicking “Email”, select “Email Routing”.

Now that we are at Email Routing select “Destination Addresses” on the navigation menu in the middle of your screen. This is where you’ll add the Gmail account email that you will be using. There will be a textbox at the bottom of the screen with a placeholder email. Type in your email for your Gmail account and select “Add address”. You will need to have access to this Gmail account as Cloudflare will send you a verification email to confirm you own the account.

Now that your destination email is added select the “Routing Rules” option from the horizontal navigation menu. Then select the blue “Create routing rule” button.

There will be three fields on the page initially to fill out. One more field will show up after we select our Action. Starting with the “Email pattern”, put whatever you want the first part of your new professional email to be. In this example mine will be “james_2” for [email protected].

Next, select your domain on the right of the “Email pattern” field. Then select the Action “Send to an email” from the Action dropdown menu. Finally, select the destination address we added and verified earlier. After adding all this information, make sure you click the blue “Save” button in the bottom right corner.

You should now have your email forwarding completely set up. In my example this means if I were to send an email to [email protected], I would receive that email in my destination address, which is my Gmail inbox. You can test this with your own email to make sure everything is set up correctly!

Now let’s move on to setting up the sending capabilities in Gmail.

Step 2: Enabling the Sending Capabilities in Gmail

Before we dive into setting up the sending process in Gmail, you will need to set up 2 Factor Authentication (2FA), also known as 2-step verification, for your Google account. After setting up 2FA, you will also need to create an App Password in your Google account which we will need later.

Step 2.1: Enabling Google Account 2FA (2-Step Verification)

If you are logged into your Gmail account, you can access your Google account by selecting your profile image in the top right of your screen. You should see a menu open up with the option to “Manage your Google Account”. Once in your Google account, select the “Security and sign-in” menu option on the left.

Once in your Security and sign-in settings, there will be a subsection titled “How you sign in to Google”. Select Turn on 2-Step Verification. You will likely need to enter a phone number or download a multi-factor authorization app for your set up. Follow the on-screen steps to complete 2FA set up, and then move on to the next section for creating an App Password which we will need for Gmail.

There is also a Google help article on this same topic.

Step 2.2: Creating App Password

In the search bar at the top of your Google account screen, type in “App passwords” and select that option when it appears. It will have the word “security” in smaller letters underneath it.

Once in the App Passwords settings, you’ll be prompted to create a name for your new password. I will use “Email forwarding to Gmail” for mine. After creating the name your password will be automatically created for you. Make sure you write it down somewhere or copy it to your clipboard for future use.

Now that you have your password set up, we can head back to Gmail for the final mandatory steps.

Step 2.3: Setting Up Gmail Sending from Another Address

Login to your Gmail inbox and click on the settings icon in the top left of your screen. Then select the “See all settings” option from the dropdown.

From the settings menu that opens, click on “Accounts and Import”. On the Accounts and Import page, you’ll see a section that says “Send mail as:” where you’ll click on the option to “Add another email address”. You will see a yellow popup appear as shown in the image below.

In the “Name” field, you want to enter the name that you wish to send/receive emails as. This will be seen by everyone you send emails to so you should make it something professional. For my example, I will make it something like, “James from Worcester County Web Design” or WCWD for short. For the email address field, enter the email you want to send/receive emails from, which is the same email we set up in the routing rules of Cloudflare. For me that is “[email protected]”. Make sure to uncheck “Treat as an alias”. Then click the “Next Step” button.

On the next screen of our yellow popup, you are going to fill out the SMTP Server field with “smtp.gmail.com”. Your username is the beginning of your Gmail email address, so for “[email protected]” the username would be “example”. Finally, you’ll fill in the password field with the App Password we created earlier.

Once this is completed you should see the confirmation and verification instructions as shown below.

You will receive a verification email from the Google Team that will contain a link for you to click. That link will take you to the page pictured below. Be sure to click the “Confirm” button to complete the process.

Congratulations! You have now successfully set up a second professional email to use from your personal Gmail account.

How to Use Your Professional Email When Sending Emails

When you are composing emails in Gmail, there will now be a dropdown menu in the “From” section to allow you to choose which email you want to send from. If you are always going to use your new professional email address, go back into the Gmail settings, navigate to the Accounts and Import section, and select “make default” next to your professional address that is now listed in the “Send mail as:” section.

If you found this tutorial helpful, or if you have any ways I could improve the tutorial, please reach via my website contact form. I really hope this was helpful!

If you’d like help setting up the technical side of your business website, Worcester County Web Design offers full setup services.