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One of the easiest and quickest ways you can be taken more seriously as a blogger is to set up a personalized email address for your domain. In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to set up a custom email address in SiteGround in 10 minutes or less!
Setting up customized email addresses for your blog is so important. Assuming you’re going to be reaching out to people – or they’re going to reach out to you and you’ll be responding – having a custom email address is one way you can make a professional first impression. In this tutorial, I will show you how to set up a customized email address in Siteground, although the tutorial is applicable to any web hosting solution that uses cPanel.
Let’s say you set up your WordPress blog on SiteGround. The very first thing you should do – yes, before you even write your first post – is set up your custom email address.
Creating your own email address is super easy and it will give an air of legitimacy to your blog, regardless of how new or old it is. If you were to receive an email from someone wanting to work with you, which email address would you take more seriously? “[email protected]” or “[email protected]”? If you want to work brands in any way, I highly recommend setting up your email address immediately.
I know many bloggers use Google’s G Suite to set up a custom email address through Gmail, but G Suite costs anywhere from $5-$25 per month! Why pay extra for this when you can use your web host to set up a free custom email address? (Well, free in that it’s included in your hosting fee!)
Do you have your hosting but no email address yet? This custom email address tutorial will help you get everything set up in 10 minutes or less. If you don’t yet have hosting and this is on your to-do list, then I highly recommend checking out SiteGround, where you can get hosting for as little as $3.99 per month! They also offer some of the best customer support in the business. If you do choose SiteGround to host your blog, check out my tutorial for setting up your WordPress blog on SiteGround.
Ready to get started? Let’s make you an email address!
Setting Up a Custom Email Address in Siteground
While this may seem daunting right now, setting up a personalized email address for your blog is one of the easiest things you’ll do on this blogging journey!
We all learn in different ways, so I wrote out the steps below, and here’s the video version. While these tutorials reference SiteGround and show the SiteGround interface, these instructions will work for virtually any web host that gives you access to cPanel.
How to create a personalized email address
1. Log into your SiteGround account, and then go to cPanel.
Go to: Siteground > My Accounts > Go to cPanel
In SiteGround, the cPanel button always seems to be red, which makes it easy to find.
You may get a pop-up asking you to access cPanel securely – that is fine!
2. Once you’re in cPanel, scroll down until you find the “Mail” section
Click on “Email Accounts”
3. Choose your custom email address
Add your name, or whatever you want people to use to be able to email you. In this instance, my new email address will be “[email protected].” In the video verson of this tutorial I set up “[email protected].” There’s no right or wrong option, though I tend to believe shorter is better.
After creating your email address, enter and confirm your password. Don’t worry about the quota.
Hit “Create Account.”
After you hit the “Create Account Button,” you’ll be able to see that they added your new email address.
4. Access Webmail
I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know that you’ll ever really need to access your email via webmail, but if you want (or need) to, click on the “Access Webmail” button.
Click the “Log in to Webmail” button.
Choose your webmail application. You can use any of these options, but don’t say I didn’t warn you: They are all equally bad.
If you click into Horde, it looks like a webmail application straight out of 1999. Chances are you won’t ever use cPanel’s webmail options. But, if all else fails, and you can’t access your messages any other way, you’ll always be able to find your email by going through the webmail applications.
5. Set up your email forwarder
Assuming you want an easier way to access your email, go back to the main cPanel page (follow the red “cPanel home” button at the top of the page). Scroll down the page until you get to the “Mail” section again, but this time click on “Forwarders.”
When the “Forwarders” screen opens up, you’re going to look for the “Add Forwarder” button. Go ahead and click on that.
Enter the email address you would like to have forwarded. This will be the new email address you just set up. Then, enter the email address where you’d like to start receiving those emails.
HINT: This is going to be your Gmail address, or whatever account you typically use to check your email!
Click on the “Add Forwarder” button.
Finally, you’ll receive a confirmation that any messages sent to your new address will be forwarded to whichever other email address you entered.
Believe it or not, setting up an email address for your blog is that simple! If you want to test it, send an email from a different email address.
It took a minute, but the test email came through to my Gmail account as expected! (And yes, I really do most of my writing in the wee morning hours!)
How to send emails using your custom email address
Setting up your account to receive email is pretty simple! Chances are, though, that in addition to reading emails, you’d like to also be able to respond to people using your custom email address. Luckily, this is pretty simple, too!
Above I demonstrated forwarding a custom email address to your Gmail account. I’m also going to use Gmail for the sake of this demonstration. If you’re NOT using Gmail, check out Step 1 below and find your preferred email client and follow the instructions provided on the page.
1. Grab your mail client configuration settings
Go back to cPanel > Email Accounts.
Under “Account @ Domain,” click on the “More” button, and then “Configure Email Client.”
Here you’ll find all of the information you need to access your customized email address in other email systems, as well as the information you’ll need to send emails from your Gmail account.
2. Head to your Gmail account
Go to the gear that’s in the upper right corner of your Gmail account, then down to “Settings.”
Once you’re in “Settings,” go to the “Accounts and Import” button.
Here you’ll see the “Send Mail as” section, which is where we want to focus right now.
3. Click the blue “Add another email address” button
A yellow pop-up will appear and you’ll want to enter your name as you’d like it to appear when you send email messages, as well as your new email address. You can keep the box checked next to “Treat as an alias.”
Click “Next Step.”
4. Set up your email server to send mail
Unfortunately, this is where things are going to get a little bit tricky. I promise it’s not too bad, though!
You’re going to need to go back to Step 1 of this section so you can grab your Mail Configuration Settings from cPanel.
I recommend using the Secure SSL/TLS Settings provided in cPanel to fill in the yellow Gmail box, which is what I always use. I can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t use the secure option.
Because you want to SEND email, you need to look at the “Outgoing Server” information. The SMTP Server box you need to fill in on the Gmail side is just that weird looking URL. There are a couple of different Port options provided in Gmail, but in this instance, it says to use Port 465. (This might be different for your account.) Your Username is the custom email address you set up (i.e. [email protected]). The password is the one you created when you set up your custom email address in SiteGround (or whatever host you’re using). You can keep the recommended Secured Connection using SSL.
Click “Add Account.”
5. Verify
Assuming (hoping?) everything went right, a screen like the one above will pop up! It will tell you that you need to wait for a verification email to come through, at which point you can click the confirmation link in the email or you can enter the confirmation code in the box.
Once you confirm the email, you’re actually done!
That’s it. Seriously.
All it takes is 10 minutes or less and you’ll be able to create your own personalized email address that forwards to your Gmail account! Once these steps are complete and you confirm that you can both send and receive email, you really shouldn’t need to tinker with your custom email address in SiteGround again!