Updated: April 8th 2016

How do you get free email hosting at your own custom domain name? It used to be so simple. You could sign up for Google Apps for domains or use Windows live but those options are no longer free. Let’s see what options are available now.

Google Apps

While you can’t sign up for Google Apps for free with new domain names if you buy an old Google Apps domain you can still enjoy free email hosting powered by Google. And you are not limited to the primary domain you purchase. You can add your own secondary domains to the Google apps account too. Find out more at GAppiness.com.

Zoho

If you are not interested in buying a Google Apps domain and want a completely free solution then Zoho mail is it. After you sign up with them you get a bunch of cloud apps including file sharing and email hosting. You can create up to 3 user accounts at Zoho for free.

Yandex

Russian search engine Yandex offers free email hosting for your domain name. First you sign up for an account at mail.yandex.com. Then you connect your domain to your account using this page. Once you’re done with the setup you’ll be able to create up to 1,000 email accounts at your domain.

Inbox.EU

inbox.eu is a free service by a major ISP in Latvia. You can create up to 3 email accounts, including the admin account, at your own domain for free. You get 15GB of storage per account and you can send attachments up to 50MB in size. There is also a premium version with more mailboxes and storage.

The interesting thing about inbox.eu is that they offer free DNS hosting too. So you just point your domain name to their nameservers and it is enough to verify your ownership of the domain and take advantage of their free email and DNS hosting.

DNS Records

For most of the email providers above you have to setup DNS records to verify ownership of your domain name and to use their mail servers. How you do this will depend on your domain registrar and DNS host. If you haven’t registered a custom domain name I strongly recommend Namecheap. You can find instructions on how to setup DNS records with Namecheap here.