Free, branded email for your side-business (e.g. hello@company.com)
Hey fellow hackers,
I made a blog post how to set up free professional email accounts for your side businesses and figured it might be of interest to others. :-)
https://medium.com/@endzeit/free-branded-email-for-your-side-business-90ce77bc769c
I've done this so often that I wonder if there's opportunity for a service that automates this for a small fee, as it's quite manual and way too time-consuming in my opinion.
What I'm thinking about:
The user enters their domain, authenticates via Gmail and the service will configure everything for them automatically, so that they can send & receive business emails through their existing personal Gmail account in seconds.
What do you guys think? :-)
I was actually just thinking the other day of writing a system that can be deployed that will interface with Mailgun's inbound and outbound API's to create a mini email interface for quickly sending and receiving emails for your domain.
Oh wow, had the exact same idea (down to using Mailgun for outbound emails to avoid dealing with email reputation and such boring things).
I envisioned a super light-weight web interface (and potential Gmail integration) that allows team members to use a "shared inbox" as well (and maybe internal comments/annotations as an additional feature).
A little bit like ZenDesk in that regard, but much more general purpose. Such a system would have been perfectly sufficient for all 1-5 people side hustles I worked on so far.
In regards to monetization:
Maybe we should team up? :-)
Ah if pricing is okay, you already have your first customer! :) I’ve tried https://frontapp.com/ but the price is waaay to high! Please keep me updated if you decide to go for it!
Will do! :-) What's the number one feature you're looking for, a shared email inbox or one of the peripheral features that e.g. frontapp is offering (integrations, collaboration, workflows, etc)?
In my case, I need plain and simple shared email inbox. Where each employee can take care of the incoming emails. The others should be aware that there is already someone taking care of a specific email. Integrations, workflows are of no interest to me. Fair price for that basic function is crucial :)
Not even an interface. I’d like to have a proxy from mailgun to use it with my normal mail client without using my gmail at all.
Collaborative inbox can easily be a paid feature I think. If done nicely - I tried zendesk but it was waaay too much and all those autoresponders were super offputting.
Yeah this system I had would expose a imap/smtp protocol too for connecting to the database.
Essentially the app would just be a UI for reading and replying/sending emails. When you reply/send, it just uses Mailgun's outbound API, and when a email is sent to you, Mailgun's inbound API would make a POST to a webhook the app exposes.
Then you can view it in the app, or just add the "server" to your normal email clients.
This is all features I am building into my product, but wanted to abstract out into an independent app. Pipe dream on that side though.
Agreed on ZenDesk being to overloaded for this.
Interesting idea on using Mailgun directly, they actually had that as a feature until 2014:
https://documentation.mailgun.com/en/latest/faq-mailbox-eol.html
As they're still supporting SMTP for outbound email the only thing required to bring that back would be a pretty light-weight shim for their inbound API that exposes email through POP3 (to stay compatible with regular email clients).
If this supported a super lightweight teams feature (multiple people can send/receive from the branded account) I think it would be a great Micro-SaaS.
Good idea, a shared inbox is quite often necessary to power support, CRM or sales funnels
I use Google Domains as my registrar. They have free GMail forwarding, and it includes a similar way to respond from the forwarded address. It might be a slightly simpler way to get free e-mail.
https://support.google.com/domains/answer/3251241?hl=en
Interesting, I wasn't aware that Google Domains is offering this as a feature.
Unfortunately Google Domains isn't available in many countries currently (e.g. Germany is missing) and requires one to use Google DNS as well (I personally like to separate registrar & DNS). Definitely a viable option if one is using Google Domains, though.
Will update the blog post with that info, thanks!
edit, now mentioned in the blog post.
Ah, didn't realize the lack of availability! The things us US citizens skip over...
Haha, no worries :-) This has actually been one of the main drivers of the european startup scene for a while (US companies being notoriously bad at localizing, as their home turf is often big enough) ;-)
Also Cloudflare (most used DNS in the world) supports automating DNS records through third-party apps by now, so the whole UX could be pretty much 1-click.
Personally, I think you missed the perfect option in your blog post.
Gold standard - Gsuite.
Sure, an EXTRA $5 per month per side project, is a tough call for validating a new idea.
But if, like me, you already pay this for your primary money making company, this is $0 extra.
Add the domain as either an alias domain or standalone.
And setup an alias in your user.
Full power of gmail, no extra cost and no need to spend time on setting up extra systems or weird workarounds, especially if your end result of article was sending yandex through gmail anyway!
I felt Zoho email is the easiest to setup.
Hi Markus! Thanks for sharing. I've just added your post to Allyship. You should get a few more claps in a minute ;) See https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/get-more-claps-on-medium-with-support-from-the-ih-community-ab431e9350
Haha, thanks Corentin :-)
This is a great share since Zoho shut down forwarding last year.
Oh I wasn't aware about this. Does that mean zoho is not option at all anymore for free custom domain emails?
They still have a free plan but no email forwarding with pop or imap. Only webmail access.
Thanks for clarifying! That removes them from the list of options. :-)
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Nice find Freddy! ForwardEmail looks very promising and more advanced than the trusty old improvmx.com I've been using for a long while.
While glimpsing through their documentation I noticed they just added a "Send mail as using Gmail" feature which might be a solution to exactly what we've been discussing here.
I recall there have been drawbacks when using Gmail in the way they mentioned (e.g. the personal address still being visible in outgoing business emails), but I'll test and see if that's still an issue.