Buying an email address

It’s best to buy email from a service provider so you can get an email address for your custom domain. I often buy my e-mail services from FastMail† because they are independent and have great customer service.

There are two different ways to get a custom email address:

1. Buy a forwarder from Hover — a forwarder will send the email to another address, like Gmail or something. But you can never respond from the custom email address.
2. Buy email from a service provider, like FastMail — this is what I would recommend, it will give you a completely separate, business account tied to your domain.

• If you choose the Hover fowarder, jump to this lesson on Hover forwarding emails ➔

If you choose the FastMail option, continue following along…

Go to FastMail† and sign up for an account—you’ll need to pick the Standard account to be able to use your custom domain.

† The FastMail links are referral links, from me, that will get you 10% off your first year.

After you’ve purchased your e-mail service we need to do some domain pointing.

Go to your FastMail “Settings”.

Then go to “Domains”.

Then press “Add Domain”.

Type in the domain exactly as you purchased in Hover and press “Save”.

We now need to take settings from FastMail and put them into Hover to connect the two pieces together.

First, go to FastMail and edit your domain.

Open up the advanced DNS settings for FastMail.

Now is where all the fun copying-and-pasting comes in.

Make a new tab in Cloudflare and go to the “DNS” tab.

For each of the following items you’ll press the “Add New” button then “Save”.

1. Point the first MX record. MX records tell the DNS system where to find your email server.

2. Point the second, backup, MX record

3. Add spam protection with a bunch of CNAME records—Do each of the CNAME records individually.

4. More spam protection with the TXT record.