I am trying to host my own email from the domain that I own. I setup cloudflare email forwarding which is nice but I want to have a full working email I can send emails from as well. I wanted to ask here to see what folks are using to do this? I have two domains and from what I can gather online, this is challenging and requires a decent amount of maintenance but I'm willing to give it a shot to see for myself if it's worth it or not.

So there's no confusion, I found a working (roundabout, but it works) way to do this using gmail smtp that allows me to send and receive emails using my domain via any email I wish. While this is 75% of what I want, it still relies on gmail as the provider and it piggyback of an existing gmail address but all the data is controlled by gmail. This method only allows me to use an email for a domain that I control but does not allow me to "host" my own email service. This means gmail has all my emails on their server instead of my own.

 

So if anyone is wanting to do this as well it requires an email forwarding service and to setup two mx records and a TXT record in your domains DNS records. In my case cloudflare.

- Start to finish is about 20-30 min.

- I used forwardemail.net to create the email (there is a free option available)

- Follow the easy to follow video guides

- To use your newly created email outside gmail's webmail, use the credentials created in the first step to create a new mail account in your email client of choice (Mac and iOS Mail Apps  and outlook in my case) email being the email you wish to [email protected] and username being your gmail email without the "@gmail.com" Use gmail's smtp (smtp.gmail.com) server and the gmail generated app password for in/out server settings.

 

This will allow you to see the emails sent to your new email on on whatever email client you choose as well as send emails from the same email.

 

I still want to host my emails i.e. on my server instead of using google's server.