Hi, Xat!

Domain email, a common topic, having a suffix that represents your own style is definitely super cool.

In addition to purchasing or receiving email services from domain service providers, there are many free services available, such as Feishu Enterprise Email, Zoho Mail, etc.

I have used Tencent Enterprise Email, but the painful login verification discouraged me. Later, I turned to Skiff Mail, which has a nice interface, although the UI/UX on iOS is somewhat not to my taste. Fortunately, it is convenient and easy to use, but after it was acquired by Notion, I began looking for alternatives.

1. Selection#

First, clarify your needs:

Integration with Gmail#

I actually have quite a few email accounts, whether it's Sohu, 163, Gmail from middle school, or later QQ digital email, QQ English email, Outlook, all in all, there are more than a dozen different email accounts.

It would be great to manage them all in one place and have a seamless experience across all platforms.

However, configuring IMAP/SMTP one by one would be too troublesome.

Since I don't have much need for sending emails, I chose to forward other branch emails to Gmail for unified collection.

The reason I don't choose iCloud Mail is that I really can't imagine using it on the web; maybe I can try it later.

Sending and Receiving Emails with Domain#

Emmm, as a domain email, the most basic requirement is to be able to send and receive emails.

Cloudflare offers a free email forwarding service, so once you configure it, you can forward to your commonly used email (like Gmail, Outlook).

However, Cloudflare's email forwarding service does not support sending emails, so you need a service that supports SMTP.

Resend is a good choice; it provides a free quota of SMTP service that you can use to send emails.

As of the time of writing, Resend offers a free quota of 3000 emails per month, with a maximum of 100 emails per day, which is more than enough for my personal use.

Apple Mail#

I am not a loyal Apple fan, but I do have a MacBook Air and an iPhone, and I prefer to use built-in applications to meet my needs, so Apple Mail is my first choice for an email client.

After iOS 17 and macOS 14, the feature that automatically copies email verification codes is also very attractive (though it doesn't work well; most of the time it can't recognize the verification codes in emails, and it seems to have a higher recognition rate for plain text emails).

2. Configuration#

For the first two needs, there are already many excellent tutorials, such as Don't waste your domain, easily have a free enterprise email with Cloudflare + Gmail + Resend in ten minutes.

Based on this article, here are the simple configuration steps.

Cloudflare Forwarding to Gmail#

Of course, any platform that can provide email forwarding services can be used; here I just take Cloudflare as an example.

1. Add your domain to Cloudflare.
2. In the sidebar menu, select Email - Email Routing.
3. Follow the prompts to add DNS records, adding the Gmail you want to receive emails to the Destination.
4. Add Routing rules, you can choose Catch-all like I did, meaning any email starting with [email protected] will be forwarded.
5. Fill in Destination with your Gmail address.

Note that for Catch-all, remember to select Send to an email for Action; the default seems to be Drop, which will discard emails directly.

This way, your domain email can receive emails.

Resend Registration and Configuration#

1. Register a Resend account.
2. Add your domain and verify it.
3. Create your API Key; remember this Key, as it will be the password for configuring SMTP later. (If you are like me and have OCD, you can limit the permissions like I did in the picture.)

Gmail SMTP Configuration#

1. In Gmail settings, find Accounts and Import, and in Send mail as, select Add another email address.

2. Fill in the SMTP information provided by Resend with the address and port; the password will be your Resend API Key.

3. Click Next, and Gmail will send you a verification email. After verification, you can use it, and you can also set it as the default sending email in Accounts and Import.

3. Client#

After completing the above configuration, you can already send and receive emails from your domain email using Gmail. Most tutorials end here.

But the needs are not over; I don't want to download Gmail on my phone, and periodically organizing software to minimize the number of applications I use is also a habit of mine.

Next, let's configure the domain email in Apple Mail.

1. First, you need to add an App Password in your Google Account; this password is used to log in to Gmail in Apple Mail.

2. In Apple Mail, add an account, select Other Mail Account, fill in your domain email, and you can fill in any password; this is just to trigger the SMTP editing interface.

3. In the SMTP editing interface, fill in imap.gmail.com for the IMAP server, and smtp.resend.com for the SMTP server. Fill in your Gmail address and the generated App Password or resend and API Key; either combination will work.

4. After saving, you still need to set different accounts and passwords for IMAP and SMTP. Go to Apple Mail settings, accounts, use your Gmail address and generated App Password for IMAP, and use resend and API Key for SMTP.

5. You're almost done, but there's one more step: in the Advanced IMAP Settings, fill in [Gmail] for the IMAP Path Prefix, so that Apple Mail can correctly recognize Gmail's folders.

6. Finally, don't forget to click Save in the bottom right corner, and then you can happily use your domain email.

4. Conclusion#

Enjoy it!