Business email on your own domain that actually arrives

01 — Own the domain yourself

Domain registration, DNS, website hosting and email are separate services, even when one provider sells them together. Start with the domain: it is the part your clients remember, and the part you should never lose.

Anyone can register a .be domain, but only through a registrar: DNS Belgium, which manages .be, does not register domain names itself. Register the domain in the name of your business and keep the contact details current through your registrar. When you move to another registrar, DNS Belgium sends the transfer code to the holder's email address, and the code is valid for seven days.

Hostinger is an ICANN-accredited registrar that offers more than 500 domain extensions, including .be and .com; Studio 0A registers its own domain there. For a .com, a registrar may refuse a transfer to another registrar within 60 days of registration or of a previous transfer. In June 2026 ICANN adopted new transfer rules that change these locks; no start date has been set yet.

02 — Choose the mailbox that fits how you work

Three routes are common for email on your own domain:

• Mailboxes with your hosting or domain provider: Hostinger Business Email gives you mailboxes on your domain, webmail and access from any mail app, such as Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail; storage depends on the plan, and Hostinger includes business email with its website hosting plans
• Google Workspace: Gmail with professional addresses on your domain, next to Google's other business apps
• Microsoft 365: Outlook on your own domain, next to Microsoft's other business apps

03 — Three records decide whether you arrive

Receiving mail servers check whether a message really comes from your domain. You arrange that with three DNS records, usually in the DNS settings of your domain or hosting provider:

• SPF lists the servers that may send mail for your domain. Keep one SPF record per domain and stay within ten DNS lookups: above that limit, SPF fails with an error
• DKIM signs every message with a key, so the receiver can check that it came from your domain and was not changed on the way. Your mailbox provider gives you the records to add
• DMARC tells receivers what to do when a message fails for your From address: none (report only), quarantine or reject, and where to send reports

04 — What Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook ask

Since 1 February 2024, everyone who sends mail to personal Gmail accounts must authenticate with SPF or DKIM, have valid forward and reverse DNS for their sending servers, use a TLS connection and keep the spam rate in Google's Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. For a new business, that applies from the first mail.

Send close to 5,000 or more messages within 24 hours to personal Gmail accounts and you also need SPF and DKIM together, a DMARC policy (none is enough), a From domain that aligns with SPF or DKIM, and one-click unsubscribe for marketing mail. Google then treats you as a bulk sender permanently, and since November 2025 it has been stepping up enforcement, up to rejecting non-compliant mail.

Yahoo asks the same of bulk senders without naming a volume, and asks them to honour unsubscribes within two days. Outlook.com has required passing SPF, DKIM and DMARC from domains that send 5,000 or more messages a day since May 2025, and rejects mail that falls short.

05 — Set it up in this order

Publish SPF and DKIM first, using the exact values from your mailbox provider. Hostinger, for example, documents an SPF include, three DKIM records and a DMARC record for its email. Then add every other service that sends mail as your domain: your newsletter tool, your webshop, and the contact form and notifications of your website or app.

Start DMARC on none with a reporting address, so you see who sends mail as your domain without blocking anything. Read the reports, fix the senders that fail, then move to quarantine and finally to reject. The Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium urges companies to use SPF, DKIM, DMARC and DNSSEC, in guidance developed with DNS Belgium. DMARC itself has been a proposed Internet standard since 2026, as RFC 9989.

Check the result. Send a test mail to a Gmail and an Outlook address and look in the message headers whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass. Belgian organisations that register on Safeonweb@work can also activate a free Quick Scan of their domain, which reports on email security among other things.

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