Summary

Have you ever wondered why people have their custom email IDs such as hi@saswatsamal.com or me@swoyam.in. How do they do it?

Well, the traditional way is to get a workspace, pay some more bucks, and get your own custom mail ready in a completely different environment. You can use services like Zoho and and Google WorkSpace.

Cons of Using These Services

💰 More money: After paying 10 USD, I don't actually find a reason to pay some more just to get my mail
📧 Separate MailBox: The above service gives you a completely different and separated mailbox, and you lose touch with your older emails once you shift

Course of Contents

A brief introduction of what we are going to do
Getting your own desired domain
Transferring your domain to CloudFlare
Getting your Custom Mail address mapped to your existing mail ID
Setting up Brevo with your domain
Setting up the SMTP server of Brevo with your existing mail

Introduction

So I will briefly introduce what are going to do to get our desired result, Just skim through the following steps:

Buy your desired domain from any domain registrar
Transfer that domain to CloudFlare by setting up CloudFlare name servers
Create a custom mail ID and point it to your existing mail address, In this example, I am going to point it to my Gmail account, but you can do the same with any mail provider, the settings are similar for every other email provider.
Then we are going to set up our brevo account, which would give us a SMTP server to send emails
We would set sending mails settings on our Brevo account, then use the same settings on our Gmail account, and then send emails through the same

Getting a Perfect Domain

There are tons of Domain name providers available, you can search for your desired domain on any of these websites and get it from whichever is the cheapest, I will list down some registrars that are my best recommendations, but feel free to choose one your own

NameCheap
GoDaddy
Name.com
Cloudflare

Transferring your Domain to Cloudflare

Sign Up for an account on Cloudflare
Add your domain in the Add Website section
You will be asked to choose a plan, If you are an individual developer like me, I would recommend you go through the free tier one, which fulfills most of requirements
It will then ask you to update the cloud flare name servers on your domain registrar page. This is a simple task, just copy the 2 name servers, remove the existing name servers on your domain, and add the new Cloud Flare one, this will transfer the domain management authority from the existing registrar to Cloud Flare
It will take around 6–8 Hours for the name servers to update globally. Officially you should wait up to 24 hours, but usually, it will get updated within 6-8 hours and you can now manage your domain from Cloud Flare

Creating Custom Email

Go to the email routing tab in your Cloudflare account. For first-time setup, it will ask you to add email routing DNS records on your domain. Add the respective DNS record on your domain to set up email routing. Then you can proceed to create your custom mail account.

Go to the above option, create your preferred custom mail ID, and forward it to your existing one.

It will then send a verification mail to your Gmail ID to verify whether the mail ID exists or not

Once you verify, your custom mail ID is ready for receiving mail. Now you can receive mail on your new custom mail ID on your existing mail ID.

Setting up your Brevo Account

Setup your domain with the account, and it will ask you to add a few DNS records on your domain to activate

Once you have added the necessary DNS records, you will be able to see the above screen that your domain is authenticated with Brevo

Now move to SMTP and API tab.

Here, you will see the address to the SMTP server of Brevo, your login email ,ID, and the port. Go ahead and generate a new SMTP key for sending mail. Save this key for further use.

Setting up Custom Mail on your existing mail

Go to the settings menu on your Gmail account.

Move to the Accounts and Import tab and click on Add another email address

Enter your custom mail address and uncheck the treat as an alias option.

Fill up the SMTP server address, the login username and the content of the SMTP key created on the Brevo platform here and click add account.

In the next step, you will receive a mail on the account mapped to your custom mail id for verification. Once you verify you will be now able to send mails through the new account by choosing the different sender from this drop down menu

Swoyam Siddharth Nayak