Custom Email Setup for Your Church Website Domain
It’s nice to move away from mychurch@gmail.com and to use corey@mychurch.com or contact@mychurch.com. The good news is that it’s fairly easy to set up and it can be free if you do it yourself!
There are a lot of options out there, but here are our top 3 methods for setting up a custom email for your church domain:
– Zoho Mail (Free for up to 5 email addresses, then paid)
– Gmail’s G Suite Email (Paid only)
– Redirect Church Email to Personal Email (Free)
Option 1: Zoho Mail
Zoho offers a “Free Forever” plan if you use their web app and/or mobile app. They also offer a paid version if you prefer to use Outlook or Mac Mail to send/receive your email. All you have to do is create an account with Zoho, verify your domain (this requires access to manage your domain), add your email users (the free plan allows up to 5 email addresses per domain), then setup MX records. If this sounds like Greek to you, Zoho provides a tutorial here. If we manage your domain, contact SolaSupport to request access to your domain. If that sounds a bit confusing, we can do it all for you. Just contact SolaSupport get started.
Option 2: Gmail’s G Suite Email
This option might suite you well if you want everything connected with your G Suite apps. Google’s pricing starts at $7/mo per email address. All you have to do is create a business account with Google, verify your domain (this requires access to manage your domain), add your email users, then setup MX records. Again, if we manage your domain and you’d like access, contact us and we can provide you with access. If you’d rather not touch the domain settings, we’d be glad to do it for you. Contact SolaSupport to get started.
Option 3: Redirect Church Email to Personal Email
You may not want to set up a church email address for sending and receiving, but you’d like a redirect email such as “contact@yourdomain.com“. All emails sent to “contact@yourdomain.com” can be sent to your personal email (e.g., myname@gmail.com). If you manage your own domain, contact your domain provider to see how to set this up. If we manage your domain, we’d be glad to give you a quote for this.
User Accounts vs. Email Aliases
One question that comes up often is, “If I want info@mychurch.org does that count as an additional user?” The short answer is no!
This is called an email “alias” which means it is not its own unique user, but it is an address that forwards to another email address. Common email aliases for churches:
- info@mychurch.org
- contact@mychurch.org
- accounting@mychurch.org
- deacons@mychurch.org
- elders@mychurch.org
If you had a user for yourself john@mychurch.org you could have all six of the above aliases on your account and still only pay for one user! The only caveat to this is that any reply you send would be from your specific email (john@mychurch.org) instead of the alias address (info@mychurch.org).
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If you’d like to save the headache completely, we offer an email setup add-on with all of our plans. If you need help during your setup and you’re not a customer, feel free to reach out to us too! We’d be happy to help give guidance if you’re doing it yourself whether you’re a customer or not!