An e-mail address that belongs to your business.

First impressions from the inbox.

Picture a guest looking for an apartment who gets two replies. One comes from yourbusiness.split@gmail.com, the other from info@yourbusiness.com. Both hosts may be equally honest, but the second looks like someone who takes this seriously.

The same goes for a booking confirmation, an invoice or a reply to an enquiry. A customer doesn't know how big your business is. They only know what they see, and the sender's address is among the first things they see. For a business it is part of the signature, like the stamp on an invoice or the logo on the van.

Anyone can open a gmail with your name.

Anyone can open a gmail address with your business's name in it, with no checks at all. That is how scammers work too: they open an address that looks like yours and send a guest fake payment instructions. A guest will struggle to tell your gmail address from one that merely looks like it.

Nobody can open an address on your domain except whoever manages the domain. Once you tell guests and customers that your mail only ever comes from addresses on your domain, a fake message is easier to spot. That sentence can go on your site and in your signature.

The domain is yours, the mailbox is a service.

This is the most important difference. With a gmail address, the address and the mailbox belong to the same provider. With a business address, they are two separate things. The domain is your address on the internet, the part after the @ sign. The mailbox is where the mail is kept, and for that you pay the provider a subscription.

So the address doesn't depend on the provider. If one day you want a different mailbox, better or cheaper, the address stays the same. Customers notice nothing, and you don't have to reprint your cards, leaflets or signs.

That holds as long as the domain is yours and renewed on time. So it's worth knowing who the domain is registered to and who renews it. If someone else built your site, check it with them.

A business address doesn't have to carry a person's name. bookings@yourbusiness.com stays the same when the person answering it changes, and the old conversations with guests stay with the business, not in someone's private account.

Why mail sometimes doesn't arrive.

A business address has to be set up properly, or messages end up in spam or don't arrive at all. Records are added to the domain that tell other mail servers a message from your address really comes from you. The technical names are SPF, DKIM and DMARC. You don't need to know them, but someone has to set them up.

When they're missing, mail often works, but not always. The reply you sent a guest may be sitting in their spam folder while you think they never got back to you.

It works the other way round too: when a domain isn't set up properly, it's easier for a scammer to send a message that looks as if it came from you. So those records protect your name, not only your mail.

What the setup includes.

Setup costs €100, once. It covers:

• helping you choose a provider and a mailbox plan
• setting up the mailbox and the domain so mail comes and goes without getting stuck
• adding the records that tell other mail servers the message really is yours
• checking that messages arrive and leave as they should

I do all of that once, at the start. Once the address is set up properly, all you do is read and send mail. You pay the mailbox subscription directly to the provider, not to me. That way the account is yours, the mail is yours, and none of it depends on me.

How many mailboxes you need, one for yourself or separate ones for bookings and invoices, is your decision, and the subscription depends on it. More addresses don't always mean more mailboxes, as bookings@ and info@ can often arrive in the same one.

And the old gmail address.

You don't have to switch the old address off overnight. You can set an automatic reply on it that gives the new address, and put only the new one on your cards, your site and your profile. Customers move across over time.

Business e-mail and your website live on the same domain, so they're easiest to set up together. If you don't have a domain yet, I sort that out in the same step.