How to Use Gmail With Your Own Domain Name (Free Methods)

Gmail is super convenient in so many ways, but it doesn’t look very professional to use an @gmail.com address for serious applications. So – can you use Gmail with your own domain name? And if so, can you do it for free? The answers to those questions are “yes” and “yes”. And in this post, you’ll learn how to do it.

In this post, I’ll walk you through three different methods to use Gmail with your own domain name. Each method varies in complexity and cost (method b is completely free), so you can choose the one that best suits your needs and technical comfort level.

Let’s get to the detailed how-to. Here’s the step by step:

Method (a): How to use Gmail with your custom domain name and email hosting

In this first method, I’ll show you how to set up Gmail with your custom email for free. However, in order for this method to work, you will need to already have a hosting setup in place – hosting that houses your email inbox/email messages – more on this in a sec.

The way this method works is that it allows you to link your custom domain name to a regular free Gmail account (e.g. username@gmail.com). Then, you’ll be able to send/receive emails using your custom domain (e.g. yourname@yourname.com) from your regular Gmail account.

When you compose a new message, you can choose between your free @gmail.com address and your gmail custom domain. If you receive an email at your custom domain, Gmail will automatically respond using that email:

For the rest of this tutorial, I’ll use Hostinger and Bluehost for our example screenshots. However, the same basic principles will apply to any host – the interface will just be a little different.

Below are the steps:

1. Create a regular free Gmail account
2. Create your custom email address via your email hosting
3. Allow Gmail to receive emails using POP3
4. Allow Gmail to send emails using SMTP
5. Test

1. Create a regular free Gmail account

To get started, create a regular free Gmail account – e.g. username@gmail.com. If you already have a Gmail account, you can use your existing account.

However, remember that the emails for your custom domain will be mixed in with any emails to your regular Gmail account, so it might be simpler to create a separate account if you’re already receiving a lot of email at your Gmail address.

2. Create your custom email address via your email hosting

Next, you need to create your custom email address using your email hosting if you haven’t done so already. E.g. you@yoursite.com

If you’re using Hostinger, you can access your email account setup through the Emails tab in the top row of your dashboard:

From there, you can click on Create email account (see image above), and then fill out what you want your address to be and set the password. In the next step, Hostinger will ask you about how you’d like to access your email. Select Recommended apps and then Server settings. This will give you all the access details needed to connect your account to Gmail later on.

This is what it looks like if you’re on Bluehost; there’s the email panel available from the left sidebar:

After completing this step, you will also be given all the access credentials to connect your email with Gmail in the next stage. If you can’t see them, go to the Connect Devices tab when you’re editing your email account. Here’s what it looks like:

No matter the host you’re on, after you handle these steps, make sure to remember or jot down the password that you choose for your email account, as well as the POP and SMTP addresses, which you can see both in the Hostinger and Bluehost example screenshots above.

3. Allow Gmail to receive emails using POP3

Once you have your email account, you’re going to use something called POP3 to connect Gmail to your custom email address. Essentially, these settings let your free Gmail account import emails from your email hosting.

To make this integration work, you’ll need the access details provided by your email host (we covered this in the previous step). Specifically, you’ll need:

• your email login
• password
• POP address and port
• SMTP address and port

Then:

• Open the Gmail settings by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner and selecting See all settings.
• Go to the Accounts and Import tab.
• Find the Check mail from other accounts setting.
• Click Add a mail account.

That should open a popup with multiple steps.

In the first step, enter your custom email address – e.g. you@yoursite.com:

On the next step, choose Import emails from my other account (POP3):

Enter the following information:

• Username – normally, this is your full email address, but sometimes it’s only the part that comes before @.
• Password – the password that you set when creating your custom email address.
• POP Server and Port – from your email host.
• Check the Leave a copy… box.
• Check the Always use a secure connection… box.
• Optionally choose to add a label.
• Click Add Account to finish the process.

4. Allow Gmail to send emails using SMTP

At this point, new emails to your custom domain should show up in your Gmail account. However, you won’t be able to reply to them from your custom email domain yet.

To fix that, you need to configure your Gmail account to send through your custom email’s SMTP server. Typically, you’ll find your email’s SMTP server information at the same spot where you found the POP3 information.

Once you have your SMTP information:

1. Go back to the Accounts and Import area in your Gmail account’s settings.
2. Find the Send mail as setting.
3. Click Add another email.

This will open another popup window that has multiple steps.

On the first screen:

• Enter your name.
• Enter the custom email address that you’re using.
• Check the box for Treat as an alias.

Next, enter the SMTP information from your email host:

• SMTP Server and Port – from your email host.
• Username – normally, this is your full email address, but sometimes it’s only the part that comes before @.
• Password – the password that you set when creating your custom email address.
• Choose whichever Secured connection method that Gmail recommends.
• Click Add Account.

Gmail will then send a confirmation code to your custom email address. You need to click the link in that email and click Confirm to finish the process.

Since you already configured Gmail to receive emails from your custom domain name, you should be able to receive this email from your Gmail account. It might take a few minutes for Gmail to fetch the email from your server.

5. Test!

At this point, you should be ready to rock. You can send and receive some test emails to make sure it’s working.

When you compose a new email in Gmail, you should be able to choose which email to send from above the To line:

If everything works, you’re all done! 🥳

Method (b): How to use Gmail with free email forwarding and SMTP (at no additional cost)

This method is an enhanced version of method (a). The key improvement is that it eliminates the need for pre-existing email hosting. Instead, we’re going to handle it all through some email forwarding trickery plus a free SMTP tool. Then, we’ll make the magic happen by connecting all that to Gmail.

Technically speaking, this is the only true method to use Gmail with your own domain name for 100% free. 🙊

Here’s the full overview of what we’re going to do:

1. Set up email forwarding through a service like ImprovMX, and direct it to Gmail
2. Set up email sending from Gmail through a free SMTP sender like Brevo’s free plan

The final result of what this method gives you – from a user’s point of view – is the same as method (a). Meaning, you will be able to send and receive emails from your custom domain name (e.g., yourname@yourname.com) right into your Gmail account.

Here are the individual steps:

1. Set up email forwarding with ImprovMX

For starters, 👉 go to ImprovMX and fill out the main form – indicating your domain name and the Gmail address where you’d like to have your email redirected:

ImprovMX will send you to the main panel after you’re done with that.

They will also send you a confirmation email to enable your account (to your Gmail address).

Click on the Email forwarding needs setup link that you see in the image above.

On the next page, you will get all the DNS settings that you’ll need to add to your DNS records with your domain registrar. Do that next.

What’s great about how ImprovMX presents those DNS settings is that it shows you the entire syntax of what a given record should look like, so all you have to do is copy each one and then paste it in the correct place inside your domain registrar’s DNS options panel. Simply clicking on any of the values in ImprovMX’s tables will copy them to clipboard.

Note; Modifying your DNS records works differently with each registrar, and some make it more difficult than others. Generally speaking, though, you will find these settings by looking for the DNS label somewhere in your user panel.

For example, if you have your domain on GoDaddy, log in to your user panel, and click on DNS next to your domain name:

On the next page, in the DNS Records tab, click on Add New Record:

If you’re with Namecheap, go to the Domain List section in your dashboard and click Manage next to your domain name:

Next, switch to the Advanced DNS tab:

From here, you will be able to add new DNS records or modify the existing ones.

If you have your domain with SiteGround, you can add new records in the DNS section of their panel, for example:

For example, here’s the interface I see with my registrar. What I need to do is paste the new records there and save them:

This is what it looks like when I add all three of them:

When you’re done, come back to ImprovMX and click on the CHECK AGAIN button up top:

Note; keep in mind that DNS settings might need a while to propagate and be recognized correctly by ImprovMX. This can take up to an hour, but that’s an extreme case, and things should start operating much sooner usually.

When the processing is done and you see a green label in the ImprovMX interface saying Email forwarding active, all incoming email forwarding for your custom domain name has been set, and you should start receiving email messages in your Gmail. You can test that out by sending an email to an address under your custom domain.

An interesting caveat here is that this method will forward all email for the entire domain to your Gmail. This means that no matter if someone sends an email to john@yoursite.com, jack@yoursite.com or random@yoursite.com, you will still get it in your Gmail.

If you’d like to disable this “catch all” behavior, you can do that in the ImprovMX panel in the Aliases tab. Here’s what you’ll see there:

• That first line is what sets the “catch all.” If you want to disable it, just click on the X icon on the right.
• Next, click on the ADD button in the second line to add a specific alias that you’d like to use, for example, yourname@yoursite.com.

This covers the “sending” part of the equation. Now let’s handle the second step:

2. Set up email sending through Brevo’s free service

Brevo is an email marketing and newsletter tool that’s quite versatile. It has standard email broadcast features, email automation, transactional emails, even SMS messaging. We’ve been fans of Brevo for years here at Themeisle and we’re actually using them for all our email communication. What Brevo also has is an awesome free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails a day, and you can use their SMTP features, too.

Just to clarify, SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, and it’s the technology that handles the process of sending email on the web.

To get started, 👉 sign up for a free Brevo account, set a login and password.

Pro tip; given that you can already receive emails from your custom domain name, you can actually use that custom email address as the one you’re signing up to Brevo with.

The signup procedure is pretty standard. Brevo will send you a confirmation email, which you have to validate, and then you can fill out the rest of your profile. Choose the free plan when you get through the main account setup.

When you’re done, you’re going to be taken to the main dashboard:

From there, click on your ID/name in the top right corner and go into Senders, Domains …

Click on Domains and then add your domain name on the next screen. When you’re done with this, Brevo will give you a set of DNS records to add to your domain settings with your registrar. This is the exact same thing we did a couple of minutes ago when setting up forwarders with ImprovMX, so just repeat the process, but this time add the values that Brevo is giving you here.

Click on Authenticate this email domain when done. If all goes well, Brevo will let you know the domain has been authenticated.

At this stage, Brevo is ready to start sending your emails. To get all the access data required from the Brevo dash, click on your ID/name in the top right corner and go into SMTP & API. You will find the address of Brevo’s SMTP server there, along with the login and password. To get all that, click on Generate a new SMTP key up top.

You can call the key whatever you wish. You can go with “Gmail” to make it clear. When you click on the confirmation button, Brevo will give you an API key that you need to copy and keep somewhere for a minute. We will need it in Gmail to set up sending.

Also set aside the other info from this page – the SMTP server address, port, and login.

Now you can go to Gmail and configure email sending for your domain name.

Go to Gmail settings, the Accounts and Import settings, and then click on Add another email address under Send mail as.

On the consecutive screens, first add your email address:

And then enter your SMTP server address, username and password:

• SMTP server – this is the server address given to you by Brevo – most likely smtp-relay.brevo.com
• Username – this is the username given to you by Brevo
• Password – this is the API key you’ve generated through Brevo

If all goes well here, Gmail will let you know that the process is nearly done and that you only have to check the verification email they’ve just sent you.

With that done, you can now send emails from Gmail, through Brevo’s SMTP service, which will put your custom email address as the sender.

Go ahead and test it out. Go to Gmail, compose a new message and select your new domain email as the sender.

If everything works, you’re all done! 🥳

Method (c): How to use Gmail with your own domain name by paying for Google Workspace (G Suite)

If you don’t mind investing a small amount, another way to use Gmail with your own domain name is to get it to work through Google’s premium email package for business, Google Workspace, formerly called G Suite.

Google Workspace essentially lets you create an entire Google account with your own custom email, instead of using a Gmail address. This not only gives you access to Gmail with your own domain name, but it also gives you separate access to other Google tools such as: Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, Calendar, and more

If you have an organization, you can also set up Google Workspace (G Suite) for your entire organization so that you can all easily share files with one another.

There’s a lot to like about this method. However, the downside is obviously that it isn’t free!

There are two ways to go with Google Workspace:

1. Business plans – these plans let you pay per user and start at $6 per month per user. So if it’s just you, you’ll pay just $6 per month. However, if your business has five employees, you would pay $30 per month (5x$6 per month).
2. Individual plan – this plan is tailored to individuals who won’t need to add other team members. However, it’s a little more expensive at $9.99 per month.

If you want to save money, using the Business plans is the best option (even if you’re an individual). However, because the Business plans are tailored towards teams, it’s a little more complicated to set things up.

If you’re willing to pay a slight premium for simplicity and you know that you won’t need to ever add more team members, it’s totally fine to go with the Individual plan.

Below, we’ll share a brief tutorial on how to set this up using the Business plans. However, if you’re interested in this method, we actually have an entire guide on how to set up Google Workspace (G Suite). Otherwise, here are the steps:

1. Create a Google Workspace account and follow the wizard
2. Verify your domain name with Google Workspace (G Suite)
3. Add MX records for email

1. Create a Google Workspace account and follow the wizard

To get started, 👉 go to the Google Workspace website.

Follow the account setup wizard to configure the basic details, like which custom domain you want to use with Google Workspace. This will be the domain name at the end of your email address – e.g. @yoursite.com:

If you’re the only person who will be using Google Workspace (G Suite), you’re finished once you complete the wizard. If you want to give other people custom email addresses, you can also do that after completing the initial setup wizard:

2. Verify your domain name with Google Workspace

Next, you’ll need to verify your domain name with Google Workspace by adding something called a TXT record. Depending on how you have things configured, you can do this at either:

• Your web host (if you pointed your domain name to your host’s nameservers)
• The place where you registered your domain name (this is the path we used when setting up DNS records in method (b) earlier in this guide; reference that one if you need guidance on how to add these records)

Google Workspace will also provide detailed instructions for most popular hosts/registrars, so you generally don’t need to worry about any technical hurdles.

3. Add MX records for email

Once you’ve verified your domain name, you also need to add another type of record called MX records so that Google Workspace can manage the email for your domain name.

You can do this via the same interface where you added the TXT record. Or, many web hosts include a built-in tool to help you add the Google Workspace MX records.

For example, with the cPanel dashboard at SiteGround, you get a dedicated Set Google MX tool in the MX Entry interface:

And that’s it! You should be ready to use Gmail with your custom domain name.

Remember – if you want a more detailed look, check out our full Google Workspace tutorial.

Conclusion: methods (a), (b), and (c) summarized

With the methods (a), (b), and (c) from this post, you can use Gmail with your own domain name and thus get the convenience of Gmail with the professionalism and brandability of a custom email address.

Let’s recap:

💡 If you want to see some other options beyond Gmail, you can also check out our guide on how to create a business email address.

Still have any questions about how to use Gmail with your own domain name? Ask us in the comments!