A professional email address on your own domain

Plenty of small businesses run for years on info.company@gmail.com. It works. Mail goes out, clients reply, nobody complains out loud. Then the employee who created the account leaves, or a $40,000 quote never reaches the person it was sent to, and it turns out the free address was never free. It's one of the first things we fix when we take over a client's site and infrastructure.

The topic has a bad reputation because it's usually sold as a matter of image, "it looks more serious". True, and the least interesting part of the story. An address on your own domain is first an asset you control, and second a technical identity that your clients' mail servers can verify. Everything else follows from those two.

This article gives the real prices, verified this week, explains why most small businesses pay for too many seats, and covers the part nobody configures: the three DNS records that decide whether your invoices land in the inbox or in the junk folder.

The short answer, for the busy

An email address on your own domain costs around $9 per person per month and solves two things a free Gmail address cannot: control of the asset, and a sender identity that receiving servers can verify. As of August 17, 2026, Google Workspace Starter lists at CAD $9.20 per user per month on a one-year commitment (CAD $11 with no commitment), and Microsoft 365 Business Basic at CAD $9.50 per user per month paid yearly. Most small businesses buy too many seats: you pay per human who needs their own inbox, not per address, since Google includes up to 30 free aliases per user and Microsoft allows a 50 GB shared mailbox with no licence assigned. The real risk isn't the price, it's deliverability: without SPF, DKIM and DMARC published correctly, your quotes and invoices land in spam, and since 2024 Gmail and Yahoo require them explicitly.

What a free address actually costs

The first cost is ownership. A personal Gmail account belongs to the person who created it, not to the company. There's no admin console, no way to reassign the mailbox, no way to suspend it on the day of a bad departure, and no way to enforce two-factor authentication across the team. Ten years of commercial history (quotes, agreements, supplier threads) lives in an account you don't control. Your domain name, on the other hand, is genuinely yours, which is exactly why it's worth choosing and protecting it properly before you build anything on top of it.

The second cost is technical, and it surprises more people. Your tools already send mail "on your behalf": your site's contact form, your invoicing software, your newsletter platform. If those tools put your @gmail.com address in the From field, they're impersonating a domain that never authorized them. Google says so plainly in its sender guidelines: don't impersonate Gmail From headers, a DMARC quarantine policy applies and your delivery may suffer. A free address can't serve as a company identity, even technically.

Google Workspace or Microsoft 365: the real numbers

Verified August 17, 2026 on both vendors' Canadian pricing pages. Google's entry plan, Starter, is CAD $9.20 per user per month on a one-year commitment billed monthly, or CAD $11 with no commitment, with 30 GB of pooled storage per person. Microsoft's Business Basic is CAD $9.50 per user per month paid yearly, plus tax, with the Office apps in web and mobile versions only; you need Business Standard (CAD $31.90, Copilot included) to get the desktop software.

For ten employees, that's a gap of about $36 a year. Your decision doesn't hinge on it. Pick based on the suite your team already lives in: if everyone works in Excel and Teams, take Microsoft; if everyone shares documents in Drive, take Google. Both do business email properly, with an admin console, built-in DKIM and account recovery. Spending three weeks comparing feature tables is a poor use of your time.

The cheap options, and where they cost you

Cheaper exists, and it's sometimes the right call. Zoho offers a permanent free plan for one domain and up to 5 users, 5 GB each, but with no IMAP, POP or ActiveSync, and only in select data centres. Translation: you work in Zoho's webmail, full stop. For a solo operator that's defensible. The day someone wants their mail in Outlook or in Mail on their iPhone, you pay.

Mailboxes bundled with your registrar or web host follow the same logic: a few dollars, working IMAP, weak spam filtering, no admin console worth the name, and your email becomes a hostage of your web hosting. Change hosts and you're moving two things instead of one.

Then there's the most common workaround: forward info@mycompany.ca to your personal Gmail and reply using "Send as". It still works today, and it stops working in January 2027. Google has announced the removal of "Send as" for third-party non-Google accounts, along with Gmailify and POP fetching on the web; Google Workspace aliases are unaffected. The transition period runs through the third and fourth quarters of 2026, and Google notes it may already restrict new configurations. If you're setting up business email this fall, don't build it on that feature.

You're probably paying for too many seats

This is the most common mistake and the easiest to fix. A six-person company ends up with twelve paid seats because someone created an account for info@, one for sales@, one for accounts@, one for hr@. You pay a seat per human who needs their own inbox, not per address printed on the website.

Google Workspace allows up to 30 aliases per user at no extra cost: mail sent to the alias arrives in that person's primary inbox. The limits worth knowing are that an alias can belong to only one user, and that it isn't an account, so nobody signs in with it. On Microsoft's side, the equivalent for an address several people handle is the shared mailbox, up to 50 GB with no licence assigned, provided your plan includes Exchange Online and each person accessing it already has their own licensed mailbox. It caps at 25 users.

In practice: six paid seats, with info@, sales@ and accounts@ as aliases or shared mailboxes. The six seats you avoid that way are worth more than $6,600 over ten years.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain language

Three DNS records, three distinct jobs. SPF is the public list of servers allowed to send mail for your domain. DKIM is a cryptographic signature added to every message, which the receiving server checks against a public key published in your DNS; it proves the message wasn't altered in transit. DMARC is the instruction you give the receiving server when neither one lines up with the domain shown in the From field: do nothing, quarantine, or reject. DMARC is also what sends you reports about who is mailing the world while pretending to be you.

None of this is optional anymore. Since February 2024, Gmail requires every sender to have at least SPF or DKIM, valid forward and reverse DNS records, a TLS connection, RFC 5322 formatting, and a spam complaint rate under 0.3%. Above 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts, you need SPF and DKIM and DMARC (a p=none policy is enough), domain alignment, and one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail. Yahoo publishes requirements of the same shape, plus an obligation to honour unsubscribes within two days. Microsoft followed: since May 5, 2025, domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day to Outlook.com must have SPF, DKIM and DMARC, or see their messages junked and eventually rejected.

Your business doesn't send 5,000 emails a day, so only the minimum is imposed on you. Publish all three anyway. DMARC is what stops a fraudster from sending a fake invoice to your clients using your domain, and that scenario has nothing to do with nine dollars a month.

Two technical traps deserve naming, because they break silently. A domain can have only one applicable SPF record: add a second one while connecting a new tool and the check returns a permanent error, taking both configurations down with it. And an SPF record can't trigger more than ten DNS lookups; every vendor include directive counts, so the sixth or seventh tool you connect tips the whole thing into error, with no warning and nothing visibly changed in your interface. An annual DNS review belongs in the maintenance nobody thinks about, precisely because nothing blinks when it's missing. Worth noting too: in May 2026 DMARC moved from an informational specification to an IETF standard (RFC 9989), and the pct tag was retired in the process.

Migrating without losing your history

The order of operations matters more than the tool. Start by inventorying every address that exists, including the ones nobody uses but that still appear on a truck or a business card. Create all the accounts at the new provider before touching DNS, and lower the TTL on your MX record the day before, so the cutover takes minutes instead of a day.

Copy the history before the cutover, not after. Google's import tool reads IMAP directly from the common providers (Zoho, GoDaddy, Titan, iCloud, Yahoo and others) and asks for each mailbox's IMAP credentials. On the Microsoft side, IMAP migration has limits worth knowing in advance: it moves mail, but not contacts, calendar or tasks, with a maximum of 500,000 items per mailbox and 35 MB per message. Address books and calendars are exported separately.

After the MX switch, keep the old mailbox alive for a month. Messages in flight will keep arriving there, and more importantly, that's when you'll discover every service that was sending on your behalf: invoicing, booking, site forms, newsletter platform. Each one has to be repointed and then listed in your SPF, otherwise it keeps sending and gets filtered. It's also the right moment to turn on two-factor authentication for the new accounts and to lock down DNS access, which is now as central to your email as it is to your website's security.

What to take away

Choosing the provider is the least important decision in this whole file: nine dollars and change per person, either way. What actually matters is how many seats you're paying for that you don't need, and the three DNS records deciding every day whether your quotes arrive. A well-configured provider with six seats beats a prestigious one with twelve seats and a broken SPF record.

If you don't know what your domain currently publishes, it takes a few minutes to check, and it's often instructive.

→ Tell us about your email setup