Getting Your Email Working

What you'll have when you're done

Two things, both free:

1. Emails sent to anything @yourdomain.com show up in the Gmail / Outlook / iCloud you already check. Whether someone writes to hello@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, or any address — it all lands in one inbox you already use. No new app to download, no new password to remember.

1. When you reply, customers see your domain — not your personal Gmail. Your customer emails hello@mybakery.com, you reply, and they see the reply coming from hello@mybakery.com. They never see your "janesmithyear1987@gmail.com" personal address.

About 10 minutes of work, mostly in Gmail's settings. Let's do it.

Before you start

• ✅ You bought your domain through us. (Check: do you see your domain — like yourname.com — at the top of your dashboard? Then yes.) If you bought your domain somewhere else, this guide doesn't quite apply yet.
• ✅ You have a regular email account already (Gmail, Outlook, iCloud, Yahoo — anything). This is where your domain emails will be delivered.
• ⏰ It's been at least 10 minutes since you bought the domain. We set things up behind the scenes the moment you buy. Anything sooner and the setup might not be ready yet.

That's all. You don't need to know what DNS, MX, or SMTP mean. We've already done that part for you.

Step 1 — Turn on email forwarding (1 minute)

1. Open your dashboard
2. In the left menu, scroll down to My Site and click Settings
3. Near the top of the page, you'll see a card called Email forwarding
4. In the box labeled Forward inbound email to, type the email address where you want your domain mail to land. (e.g. your personal Gmail: you@gmail.com)
5. Tick the checkbox that says Enable email forwarding
6. Click Save

That's it for step 1.

If you see an orange "we're still setting things up" message: wait 5-10 more minutes and try again. We're still finishing background setup for your domain. (No action needed from you — go grab a coffee.)

Send yourself a test: Open your phone. Email hello@yourdomain.com from your phone's mail app or a friend's account. Within a minute, it should show up in the inbox you typed in step 1.4. If it doesn't, see "Something didn't work?" near the bottom of this guide.

Step 2 — Set up Gmail to send AS your domain (5-10 minutes)

So far, customers can email you and you'll see it. But if you reply right from Gmail, they'll see your reply coming from your personal Gmail address — which kinda defeats the point of having a domain.

Gmail has a built-in feature called Send mail as that fixes this. It lets you reply through Gmail's normal interface, but the customer sees your reply coming from your domain. Set it up once, forget about it forever.

Part A — Get a special password from Google (3 minutes)

Google won't let regular apps use your Gmail password directly anymore (security thing). You need to generate a one-time-use "App Password" for this setup.

1. Open myaccount.google.com/apppasswords in a new tab
2. Sign in with the Gmail account you'll be using
3. (If Google asks you to turn on 2-Step Verification first, do that — it's a 2-minute setup, and you'll need it. Pick "phone" as the second factor.)
4. On the App Passwords page, type any label — like mywebsite.com — and click Create
5. Google shows you a 16-character password in a yellow box. Copy it now. You can't see it again after you close the page.

Don't worry, this password is ONLY for this email setup. It doesn't replace your real Gmail password.

Part B — Tell Gmail to send mail as your domain (3 minutes)

1. Open mail.google.com and sign in
2. Click the gear icon (top right) → See all settings
3. Click the tab Accounts and Import
4. Look for a section called Send mail as: → click Add another email address
5. A small window opens. Type:

- Name: what you want customers to see (e.g. "Jane's Bakery" or your name) - Email address: the address on your domain you want to send from (e.g. hello@yourdomain.com) - Leave Treat as an alias ticked - Click Next Step

1. Gmail now asks for sending settings. Type:

- SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com - Port: 587 - Username: your Gmail address (the one you signed in with — e.g. you@gmail.com) - Password: paste the 16-character App Password from Part A — NOT your regular Gmail password - Leave the rest at defaults - Click Add Account

1. Gmail will send a verification code to hello@yourdomain.com (or whichever address you typed). Because of the forwarding you set up in Step 1, this email lands in your regular Gmail inbox a few seconds later. Open it, click the verification link or copy the code.
2. Done. Refresh Gmail. When you click Compose, you'll now see a From field at the top. Click it once and pick your domain address. Gmail remembers your choice for that conversation.

Part C — Try it

Email a friend from Gmail, but in the From dropdown, pick hello@yourdomain.com instead of your personal Gmail. When your friend replies, the reply comes back to hello@yourdomain.com which forwards back to your Gmail — so you see their reply in the same thread, on your phone, in the same Gmail.

Doing the same in other apps

The steps above are for Gmail. Other email apps work the same way — they all want the same info: an App Password from your email provider, and the SMTP server name.

• Apple Mail / Mail on iPhone: Mail app → Settings → Accounts → Add Account → Other → Add Mail Account → enter your domain address → use the same SMTP settings (smtp.gmail.com, port 587, App Password)
• Outlook desktop: File → Add Account → Manual setup or additional server types → POP or IMAP → enter your domain address → SMTP: smtp.gmail.com, port 587, App Password
• Outlook.com / Hotmail.com (webmail): Settings → Mail → Sync email → Other accounts → Add. Same info.
• Yahoo Mail: Yahoo also supports "Send mail as" under Settings → More Settings → Mailboxes. Same info pattern.

If you use something else and get stuck, drop us a note at support@siteglowup.ai and we'll walk you through it.

What about cost?

It's free. Genuinely.

• We pay AWS pennies per thousand emails received on your domain — typical shops are well under a dollar a month, and we cover it.
• Gmail handles sending; you're using your existing Gmail account, no extra Google charges.

The only cost involved is your domain registration (you already paid us for that as part of buying it), which renews once a year at the price we showed you when you bought.

If you ever get popular enough that Gmail's free-tier daily send limit (about 500 emails per day) gets in your way, that's a great problem to have — at that point a small upgrade to a paid mailbox like Google Workspace is the next step.

Something didn't work?

"My test email never showed up in Gmail."

1. Wait 5 minutes — first-time delivery can be slow while spam filters get to know your domain.


2. Check your Spam folder. First-ever forwards sometimes land there. Mark as "Not Spam" and future ones go to the inbox.


3. Double-check the email address you typed in Settings → Email forwarding. Typos are by far the most common cause.


4. Try sending from a totally different email account, not from another @yourdomain.com address. Some providers dedupe mail you send to yourself.


5. Still nothing? Email support@siteglowup.ai with your domain name. We'll check the back-end and fix it in minutes.

"Gmail won't let me add the App Password."
Make sure you generated the App Password from the exact Gmail account you're trying to set up. Each Gmail address has its own. If you have 2-Step Verification turned off, Google won't even show you the App Passwords page — turn it on first (it takes 2 minutes; pick "Phone" as the second factor).

"When I reply, it says 'on behalf of you' or 'via gmail'."
Some mail clients (especially older Outlook versions) tack on a "via" line. It's a display quirk, not a bug — your customers will still reply to your domain address, and you'll still get their replies in Gmail. If you want it gone, generate a fresh App Password and re-add the SMTP account in Step 2 Part B.

"I want to stop the forwarding."
Go back to Settings → Email forwarding in the dashboard, untick Enable email forwarding, and click Save. Your customers can still email your domain address but the messages stop landing in your Gmail. (If you also want to remove the "Send mail as" setup from Gmail, do that in Gmail's settings → Accounts and Import → Send mail as → click delete.)

"Can I have hello@ go to one person and sales@ go to another?"
Not yet — right now everything on your domain forwards to one personal inbox. If you need split routing, the simplest path is to upgrade to Google Workspace (about $6/user/month) and have separate mailboxes per address. We'll add native split-routing to this feature down the line if folks ask for it.

What's NOT in here

Worth being upfront: this is mail forwarding, not a full mailbox. That means:

• ❌ No separate inbox at @yourdomain.com. Your email lives in your existing Gmail. There's no "log into yourdomain.com mailbox" page.
• ❌ No team inbox. If three people need to see the same incoming mail, this isn't the right tool — Google Workspace's shared inbox is.
• ❌ No archive of old mail with us. Your Gmail keeps your sent and received history. We hold forwarded copies for 7 days max, then they're deleted automatically.
• ❌ No calendar / contacts / Docs at your domain. Those are separate Google Workspace features.

If you outgrow this, Google Workspace ($6/user/month) and Microsoft 365 Business Basic ($6/user/month) are the natural next step. Both work alongside what we set up here — you'd just sign up with them, point your domain at their servers (we'll help with that switch when you're ready), and turn this forwarding off.

Curious how this works behind the scenes?

You don't need to know any of this to use it. But for the curious:

When your customer emails hello@yourdomain.com, the message goes through these stops:

1. Their email server looks up where to send mail for your domain. We've set things up so it goes to Amazon (AWS).
2. Amazon receives the email and tucks it into a safe storage spot.
3. A tiny piece of our code wakes up, grabs the message, looks at who it was for, finds your forwarding address in our database, and re-sends the message to your Gmail.
4. Your Gmail rings; you read it.

The whole trip takes a few seconds. Steps 1-2 are called "MX records" + "SES inbound" in tech-speak; step 3 is a "Lambda function"; step 4 is just regular email. Now you know — but you'll never need to think about any of it again.