What email address should a small company actually use

I have had an email address since 1996. In the thirty years since, I have watched good companies make the same mistake in their first year. They spend three weeks choosing a name, buy the domain in ten minutes, and settle the email address in the thirty seconds before the print shop closes.

The address outlives the decision. It goes on invoices, contracts, delivery notes and the side of a van. Changing it later is not a settings change, it is a letter to every customer you have.

Here is the whole decision. It takes about ten minutes if you do it before the cards are printed.

Start with the part you own

A .com costs about ten dollars a year. Cloudflare sells them at registry cost, currently $9.77, and most registrars land between ten and twenty.

That is the cheapest line in your entire business, and it is the only part of your email you actually own. Everything else is rented. If your address ends in somebody else's domain, whether that is a free provider or the one your web host handed you, the address is theirs and you are borrowing it.

The test is short. If you fell out with that company tomorrow, could you take the address with you? If not, it is not your address.

There is a mechanical reason as well as a philosophical one. SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the three DNS records that let a receiving server tell your mail apart from somebody pretending to be you, are published on a domain you control. Without your own domain you cannot publish them at all, so you have no way to prove a message came from you.

The three wrong answers

A free consumer address. It works, it costs nothing, and every business buyer notices it and says nothing. You cannot add a colleague to it. You cannot hand it over when somebody leaves. If the provider locks the account you have no contract, no support and no argument.

info@ on its own. This one is interesting because it looks correct. The problem is that nobody owns it, so nobody answers it. It is also the most guessed and most scraped address on any domain, so it collects more spam than the rest of the company combined. And a reply from info@ tells the customer that no particular person read what they wrote.

The address that came with the hosting. Free with the website, configured once by whoever built it, never touched since. The person who set it up has left, nobody knows the password, and because it lives with the hosting, changing web host means changing email. Two problems welded together for no reason.

The rule

People write to people. Give everyone their own name at the company domain. Keep one shared address for the things that outlive a person.

That is the whole thing. Almost every question you have is answered by those two sentences.

Ahmed writes to Maria because Maria quoted him. Maria goes on holiday and Ahmed writes to her anyway, because that is the address he has. So the shared address exists for the things that must not depend on Maria being at her desk: orders, invoices, and whatever your version of "the one we cannot drop" is.

Two or three shared addresses. Not ten. Every shared address you create is a promise that somebody is reading it.

The details that are annoying to change later

firstname@ or firstname.lastname@. Decide on whether you will ever have two people with the same first name. At five people and hiring, you will. Settling this after the cards are printed leaves one person with a different format from everybody else, permanently.

Say it out loud on the phone. This is the test I use and it has not failed me yet. If you cannot say the address once and have the other person write it down correctly, it is the wrong address. That rules out hyphens, digits, and any spelling a stranger will guess at.

Do not create an address you will not answer. A support@ with nobody behind it is worse than no support address at all. The customer wrote, and now they know nobody read it.

Do not give one person a department address. If sales@ arrives in one person's inbox, it is that person's address in a costume, and it breaks on the day they leave, which is the exact day you needed it not to.

What this actually costs

Every figure below is monthly, no annual commitment, per user. That is what you pay if you want to be able to leave next month, and when you are choosing your first address it is the number that matters. Checked on 30 August 2026. Everyone here, ours included, shows a different figure depending on the country you are in, so check your own before you plan around mine.

The domain sits on top of any row, at about ten dollars a year, whoever you buy the mailboxes from.

Everyone on that list discounts a yearly commitment, and by roughly the same amount. Google by 16 per cent, Zoho from $1.25 down to $1.00, Microsoft from $8.40 down to $7.00, and us by 15 per cent. So if you are willing to be tied in for a year, take about a sixth off every row.

I have left the monthly numbers in the table because a company choosing its first email address should see what leaving costs before it sees what staying saves.

The useful thing in that table is how little the mailbox costs and how much the suite around it does. An address on your own domain is somewhere between free and a euro a month from anybody. The money starts when you add documents, calendars and storage.

One difference worth reading before you pick anything on the cheap end. Zoho's free tier is web only, with no IMAP or POP, so you cannot open it in a mail client at all. Ours includes IMAP, POP3 and SMTP on the free plan, which is the difference between an address you can use from anything and an address you can only use in somebody else's browser tab.

Our free plan has limits of its own and they are not the protocols. Fifty sends a day and twenty-five megabyte attachments, which is fine for two people consulting and not fine for anybody sending quotes with drawings attached.

And Google gives you two terabytes on Business Standard where we give you a hundred gigabytes on Professional. If you store video, that gap will matter to you more than the price does.

I would rather you knew that before you commit than after.

The ten minute version

1. Buy the domain. Ten dollars.

2. Everybody gets firstname@ or firstname.lastname@. Choose the format now.

3. One or two shared addresses for what outlives a person.

4. Say each one out loud before you commit to it.

5. Print nothing until the four above are done.

I run a company that sells business email, so treat the rows with our name on them as a disclosure rather than a recommendation. The rest of this was true for twenty years before I had anything to sell, and it is true whoever you buy from.