Running a Custom Email Address

This is primarily written for my friend Jewel, but I might as well document it for everyone else.

I own the domain peacock.dev, and it’s a fun one to have! It allows me to have the <firstname@lastname.tld> format, which is concise and unique. It’s also been convenient as I’ve changed my name a couple times over the past few years. My original gmail account can’t ever be adjusted, and it’s going to be a struggle to leave it behind. I’ll go over the basics of how this all works, and share some tips I’ve learned that make my life better along the way.

Also, apart from the TLD registration, all of these are free services with optional upgrades for additional features, at the time of writing!

Registering a domain

I’m pretty ambivalent about domain registries. I used to like Google Domains, but now my domains are split between Netlify and Squarespace. It doesn’t really matter where you pick them up, so if anything is more convenient for a website, it’ll be fine as long as it lets you configure DNS records. You can even buy one through Zoho.

Setting up your email

The Zoho docs are pretty well defined! Start by creating an account using an existing email (it’s good to have a fallback gmail or protonmail for this). Then go ahead and follow the documentation.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/how-to/setup-my-domain-with-zoho-mail.html

It may be scary to deal with CNAME and TXT records, but I promise that the guides are pretty clear and it’s simpler than you’d expect. You only have to do it once.

Congrats! You can test sending and receiving email now and everything else after this is optional.

Catchall address

This is a pretty easy thing to set up, and it’s so so worth it.

In Zoho, you go into the Admin console, then Domains -> Advanced Settings -> Catch-All Address

You can set your primary account as the catch-all address, and then any typos or one-off aliases will be simply delivered to your mailbox. It’s super worth doing.

Aliases

Aliases are another step you can use for this if you have specific other addresses you want to be able to send an receive mail as in your inbox. For me, I’ve had two name changes since I started using the peacock.dev email domain. I handled this by:

1. Exporting my old mailboxes
2. Creating my current address as kaia
3. Importing the old mailboxes, then moving them to the archive folder so they’re searchable in my new account
4. Deleting the old addresses
5. Setting them as aliases for my current address

It’s a bit of a process, but I can now send and receive mail from all three addresses, and I collect it all into a unified inbox. This is helpful if you go by multiple names, or if you want to have some kind of admin or other kind of abstraction you like.

Filters

Fun fact - on most email providers you can add a + after your handle and tack on whatever you want. I use +promos for most shopping websites and +newsletter for signing up for news and blogs, and then I have filters that put those automatically into folders for me. I have stuff in promos get marked as read automatically to keep my feed a little clearer, too.

Make a Google Account

This one is really exciting to me! I’d been using Zoho for years, and while it gets the job done, there were some inconveniences in leaving the Google ecosystem behind. Calendar invites worked, but they weren’t easy to unify with my work calendar or shared invites from my spouse or friends. If I had someone send me a Google Meet or Drive link, I’d have to sheepishly ask them to re-invite my gmail account. I also couldn’t use it for payments, owning my phone, etc.

This is all solved through this new trick I figured out recently - you can create a Google account without a Gmail account!

Start by going to the account switcher in a Google account, and then below your existing accounts, click “use another account”. From there, click “create account”, fill out your name and a date of birth, and finally click the “Use your existing email” button.

This will send a confirmation email to your account, and you’ll be able to sign up successfully!

This gives you access to a full Google account with everything except Gmail! You don’t have to pay for Google Suite for your custom domain.

One final note - if you try to visit Gmail with this account they will show you this form, trying to convince you to “add a gmail address”. DO NOT DO THIS. It ruins everything and your custom email become a secondary backup address that can’t be used for calendar invites or anything useful.

Campaigns

Zoho campaings offers the sorts of email automation and newsletter support you might imagine for running a business. A lot of the more advanced automation and functionality is locked behind a paywall, but you can use it to coordinate up to 2,000 contacts and send 6,000 messages per month, which is plenty for a small website and newsletter like mine.

To migrate from Substack, I simply exported my mailing list to csv and imported it into campaigns. You will have to set up more two more text records for your domain, but once that’s done you can send email blasts from your own address, with a nice wysiwyg editor.

See this guide on configuring spf and dkim TXT records: https://help.zoho.com