Send and Recieve emails with your domain for free

Are you owning a domain name and want to send and recieve email using your domain for free? Yes, free, I just came accross a third party website Mailgun which lets you do this, with a limit of 10,000 emails per month under their free plan.

When you purchase a domain name, most of the time, it will come with free email forwarding service i.e. you can create an virtual email address with your domain and use this service to forward any incoming email, however you won't be able to send the email using this address. Mailgun provides you a free service (10,000 emails in free plan) that you can send and recieve. In this case post, I'll explain the setup with Mailgun and Gmail in order to use this service.

Signing up with Mailgun

First step is to have an account created with Mailgun. Once registered, verify your account with your mobile number. Next, add your custom domain.

You might have to copy the MX records and add in your DNS records in your domain Nameserver records.

Email Forwarding 

Select Routes tab in Mailgun and create your first route :-

Filter Expression : match_recipient("[email protected]")

This is the email address that you want to create (virtual email) where you want to recieve your emails.

Actions : forward("[email protected]")

This is your personal Gmail address where you want to forward your emails. Note, we will be using the same email account to send email with your custom domain.

Priority : Set it to 10

Description : Any descriptive notes for you.

Sending Email 

In order to send emails from your Gmail account with your custom domain, we would need SMTP settings from Mailgun.

Select your domain in Mailgun and click on "Manage your SMTP accounts", and then select "Create new SMTP credential". Here use the email address where you are recieving your emails with custom domain (e.g. [email protected]")

On the right side of Mailgun page, SMTP server details would be available. We would need this information while configuring the Gmail account.

Now go to Gmail and follow the below steps :-

- Select Settings and go to "Accounts and Import"

- Go to "Send email as" and select "add another email you own"

- Use any name and the email address as specified in Mailgun for custom domain i.e. [email protected]

- Enter the SMTP server, username and password details from the Mailgun.

Verify your account and that's it. When you'll send any email with Gmail, it will show you the dropdown to select which account you want to use to send an email.

5550 5.7.1 Relaying Denied Errors :-

You might get "Relaying Denied" error while forwarding an email, here are some tips :-

- Use a different email account to send the email to your custom domain email address.

- Make sure your Mailgun account is verified with your mobile number. Use the verification link in your email address when you register with Mailgun.

- DNS name propagation from Mailgun in your Nameserver acccount may take some time (upto 24 hours), use "Check DNS" in Mailgun to verify that your nameserver is updated.