Your email address is part of your quote

A quote sent from [email protected] and the same quote sent from [email protected] contain identical numbers, yet they don't land the same way with the customer.

Free webmail is perfectly fine for personal use. For a business, an address on your own domain changes three practical things, as well as one technical detail that decides whether your messages arrive at all.

What a business address changes

• Customers can see that your email comes from the same business as your website, which makes your quotes and invoices easier to trust.
• The mailbox belongs to the business rather than to a person, so when someone leaves, you keep their mailbox, their client history and their address.
• An administrator can reset passwords, require two-step login and remove access from a lost phone, none of which is possible with a collection of personal accounts.

The step most setups miss

Buying Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace licences is the easy part. The step that often gets skipped is adding three DNS records that prove your email really comes from you.

• SPF lists the servers that are allowed to send email for your domain.
• DKIM adds a digital signature showing that a message wasn't altered on its way to the recipient.
• DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with messages that fail those checks, and sends you reports about them.

Gmail and Yahoo began enforcing sender requirements in 2024. Every sender now needs at least SPF or DKIM, and bulk senders need all three records. Microsoft started rejecting non-compliant bulk mail sent to Outlook addresses in 2025. Without these records, your invoices and quotes are far more likely to end up in a spam folder.

It also protects your customers

Criminals regularly impersonate real businesses to redirect payments, a fraud known as spear phishing. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre recorded about $68 million in reported losses to spear phishing in 2025. A DMARC policy makes it much harder for anyone to send email that appears to come from your domain, which protects your clients as well as your reputation.

A worked example

Consider a bookkeeper who sends monthly invoices from a free webmail address. When a new client's email system receives a business invoice from a free account, with no authentication tied to the business, it may treat the message as suspicious and file it in spam. The invoice can then sit unseen for two weeks before anyone notices.

If the same bookkeeper sends from an address on their own domain, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place, the receiving system can confirm that the message is genuine. The invoice arrives in the inbox, and the address matches the website the client found in the first place.

Choosing between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace

Both are solid choices for a small business, and both handle email, calendars, file storage and video calls. The most practical way to choose is to think about how your team already works.

• If your team spends its day in Word, Excel and Outlook, Microsoft 365 will feel familiar.
• If you mostly work in a browser with Docs and Sheets, Google Workspace is usually the easier fit.

Prices change from time to time, so check each vendor's current plans before you commit, and compare the tiers that include the security features you need.

Setting up shared addresses

Addresses such as info@ or billing@ shouldn't depend on one person's mailbox. Set them up as aliases or shared mailboxes so that several people can see the messages and nothing is lost when someone is away or leaves. In Microsoft 365, a shared mailbox doesn't need its own paid licence for typical small-business use.

Common mistakes

• Sharing one mailbox and one password across the whole team, which makes it impossible to tell who sent what.
• Forwarding business email to a personal Gmail account, which can break authentication checks and places business records in a private inbox.
• Leaving the mailboxes of former staff active and unmonitored.
• Skipping two-step login because it feels like a hassle.

Moving over from a free address

1. Set up the new mailboxes and DNS records first, and test them.
2. Update your address on your website, your Google Business Profile, your invoices, your bank account and your supplier accounts.
3. Keep checking or forwarding the old address for a few months while everyone catches up.
4. Send a short note to regular clients so that they know the new address is genuine.

Frequently asked questions

Can I keep using my Gmail address?

You can keep it for personal use. For the business, it is better to switch to your own domain and keep the old address only as a temporary backstop while people update their records.

Do I need a licence for every person?

In most cases, anyone who needs their own full mailbox needs a licence. Shared addresses such as info@ can usually be set up without an extra licence.

Will DMARC stop my own emails from being delivered?

It won't if you set it up in stages. Start with a monitoring-only policy, review the reports to make sure everything you send is authenticated, and tighten the policy only once the reports look clean.