Free Custom Email Address
By: Ahmed Shaaban
Tags: Email, Domain Names, DNS, Smtp

I always wanted to own my own email address because of two main reasons:

Branded Email Does Your Marketing For You It is cool!

and to be honest, it may benefit small business owners who don't want to spend much time and money in the early stage of their business on managed domain mail servers.

You don't need a technical background to follow this tutorial, just a pc and internet.

So today I am going to share with you how I did achieve this without paying a cent.

We are going to create a custom mail address that will be managed by Gmail (sending/receiving mails), so there will not be any shift or moving to other platforms that you are not already familiar with.

For the sake of this demo, I used Gmail because it is my main email provider for 10 years but feel free to use any email provider, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

Tools will be used:

Freenom Kingmail Gmail

Freenom

Basically, freenom is like any domain provider however it provides free domain ending with .tk, .org, etc…

After registering you check the availability of the desired name for your domain

Then you will see some free tier domains and some priced domains. for the sake of this demo, we will be moving with the free tier domains as shown in the following image:

Select “Get it now” and it will be added to the cart the proceed to “checkout”

make sure you choose a 1 year period which also lies in the free tier.

After finalizing the “purchase” you can view your domain from the top menu under services -> my domains, proceed to “manage domain” then “manage freedom DNS”

Go to “Management tools” -> “Nameservers”

Make sure “use default nameservers” is chosen then click “Change Nameservers”.

Now let's move to “Manage Freenom DNS” and hold the tab for a while.

Kingmail

Kingmail is an email service like any mailgun for example however it provides routes for free.

Please make sure that you register with the email you will use to redirect emails to/from your custom email.

After creating an account proceed to the “domains” tab and click “Add new domain”

add the domain name you created with freedom and the verifying method to be “DNS” and continue to “Create Domain”

It will generate ate a TXT record to verify that you own the domain you provided

Copy the whole verification text and move back to freedom tab and add the record like the following:

Then “Save Changes”.

Move back to kingmailer tab and click “verify TXT record”.

Usually, this takes about 5–10 minutes so it is ok if this message appeared. maybe go grab some coffee until the DNS is probably configured.

So after waiting we will finally get this message

which means we can proceed.

Now we will be adding more DNS records to freenom. by following the instructions we will end up having something like this

“save changes” and again we will need to wait 5–10 minutes until the DNS records get updated.

We can check the records have been updated or not in kingmail “check my records are correct”

Finally, we will get that the records have been verified

Basically, it indicates that we have linked our domain with the email service.

Now in kingmail lets move to the “credentials” tab and click “add credential”

“create credential”, will generate a password that will be used when we will configure Gmail SMTP.

Now moving to the “Route” tab and “add route”

name is what you want your email to be, in my case it will be me@freemaildomindemo.tk.

Now we will move to the interesting part. Gmail

Gmail

I think we don't need a description here so let's move directly you our Gmail.

Under “setting” “see all setting”

move to accounts and imports:

and click “Add another email address”

add the email you choose in kingmail then proceed to “Next Step”

again add the username as the mail and the password is the credential we generated earlier then proceed to “Add Account”

this should take you to the verification page:

Moving back to kingmail under the “Messages” tab “incoming messages” we will find the Gmail verification mail

Click on it and move to “plain text” and copy the verification code and add it to the Gmail verification code then proceed with “Verify”.

Now we can see that the mail has been added successfully to Gmail accounts.

so let's try if it is working.

and hooray!! we can see that it is received successfully.

Now let's try to send an email, make sure you choose the created domain email under the “From” tab

and hooray!! again we were able to send email successfully.

Conclusion

Owing a custom email address is easy and free especially if you are starting your own business and you want to cut expenses for growth, so for small business owners, it is not very professional to send mails having @Gmail or @Yahoo as postfix.