Professional email for your business: Google, Microsoft or Zoho?

An address like bookings@yourcafe.com tells people straight away that the message comes from a business, not from someone with a free account. Here's how to choose a service, what it costs in 2026 and which settings make sure your messages land in the inbox rather than spam.

Why an address on your own domain is worth it

• It looks like a business. Customers trust a message from name@yourbusiness.com more than one from yourbusiness2019@gmail.com.
• The address belongs to the business. When someone leaves, their mailbox stays with you and someone else can take it over.
• It's delivered better. Your domain has settings that prove the message came from you, so spam filters trust it more.
• It's harder to fake. With the right settings, someone sending email in your name gets stopped by the receiving servers.

You need a domain first; if you don't have one, the steps are in how to register a domain name.

The three services compared

Prices are US list prices before tax. Google's annual plans lock in the number of licences until renewal; month-to-month plans cost about 20% more but can change any time. Microsoft's new prices apply to existing customers at their first renewal after 1 July 2026, and Business Premium stayed at $22. Zoho's prices vary by country.

How to choose

Choose based on the tools your team already uses. If everyone has Android phones and lives in Gmail, Google Workspace needs no new habits. If the office runs on Excel and Word, Microsoft 365 Business Standard includes the desktop apps. If you just need a few mailboxes for a small business and nothing else, Zoho Mail or your host's mailboxes are enough.

A few things to keep in mind:

• You pay per user, not per address. Shared addresses such as hello@ or bookings@ can be aliases or groups that reach the right people at no extra cost.
• Switching later is possible but takes time. Old mail can be imported, but choosing well up front is simpler.
• Email bundled with hosting is the cheapest, but usually has less storage and weaker spam filtering, and if you change hosts, you move your email too.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC: the settings that keep you out of spam

Since February 2024, Gmail has required everyone sending to its users to set up at least SPF or DKIM, and anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses to have all three, plus one-click unsubscribe. Yahoo introduced the same rules, and Microsoft has enforced them for Outlook.com since May 2025. A small business sends far less than that, but the settings still help delivery and protect you from people sending fake messages in your name.

That protection matters: the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded about $3 billion in losses from business email compromise in 2025, scams where criminals pose as a business or its suppliers to redirect payments.

All three are DNS records, added wherever your domain is managed. Your email service gives you the exact values. One thing people often forget: if your website sends email (a contact form, a booking confirmation) through another service, that service must also be included in SPF and sign with DKIM, or exactly the messages going to customers end up in spam.

The steps, from scratch

1. Buy the domain, if you don't have one, in the business's name.
2. Choose the service and sign up with your domain.
3. Prove you own the domain with a TXT record in DNS.
4. Change the MX records so email arrives at the new service.
5. Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
6. Create the users and shared addresses.
7. Send a test message to a Gmail address and check, under "Show original", that SPF, DKIM and DMARC say PASS.

When we build a site, we register the domain and set up email on it, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured, including for messages sent by the site's forms. The details are on our web design page.