Business Email on Your Own Domain

Business email is email on a domain you own — you@yourcompany.com rather than yourcompany@gmail.com. With Google Workspace you get the Gmail interface people already know, but the account belongs to the organisation rather than to the individual. That single difference is what gives you an admin console, shared addresses that are not a shared password, enforceable security, retention, and the ability to keep someone's correspondence when they leave. A free Gmail account gives you the mail and none of the rest.

Almost never as a mailbox with a password several people know. There are two proper options. A Google Group costs nothing extra and delivers to members' own inboxes or to a shared collaborative inbox — right for most shared addresses. A licensed account with delegated access costs a seat but behaves like a real mailbox with its own filing, which suits a genuinely busy shared address or a team migrating from an Outlook shared mailbox. Either way each person signs in as themselves, so you can tell who did what and remove one person without disrupting everyone.

Usually not. Most are configured as groups or aliases, which do not consume a paid licence, and licences are per person rather than per address. This is one of the more common reasons a first quote comes back larger than it needs to be — a business counts its addresses instead of its people. A licensed account is only needed where the shared address really is a working mailbox in its own right.

Yes, and it costs nothing extra. Aliases let a single licensed account receive mail at several addresses — a second spelling of the company name, an address kept from a rebrand, or a departmental address that one person currently handles alone. Only actual people need licences.

Whichever you pick, pick it before you create the first account and then stick to it. firstname@ is friendly and runs out quickly. firstname.lastname@ scales and is what most people expect. Initials are compact and unguessable, which is occasionally the point and usually a nuisance for customers. The format matters less than the consistency — changing convention later means every signature, business card and supplier record in circulation is wrong.

Generally no. A catch-all accepts mail sent to any address at your domain, which sounds like a safety net and works out as a spam magnet, because it guarantees delivery for every address a sender invents. The better arrangement is to switch it off and create specific aliases for the misspellings that genuinely occur — which you will discover in the first month of proper logging.

Yes. Gmail works in any browser and has apps for Android and iOS, and mail, contacts and calendar sync to the built-in apps on both. On Windows, Outlook can be kept working against a Google Workspace account if part of your team genuinely needs it — though that is better treated as a transition aid than a permanent arrangement, for reasons we set out on the Microsoft 365 migration page.

The technical work is a matter of hours for a small team — verify the domain, configure DNS and MX records, create accounts and groups, publish the authentication records. What sets the actual timeline is deciding the address format, which shared addresses exist and who should reach them, and what happens to a leaver. Businesses that answer those in one sitting are live quickly; the rest are waiting on themselves, not on us.

That is almost always domain authentication rather than content. SPF, DKIM and DMARC tell receiving mail systems that your mail genuinely comes from you, and DKIM in particular is not switched on by default — the key has to be generated and published deliberately. We configure all three as part of the setup rather than leaving them as a follow-up nobody owns.

Google Workspace is licensed per user per month, with India list prices starting at the Base tier and rising with storage and features rather than with the number of addresses. We invoice in INR with GST against your GSTIN. Because shared addresses and aliases usually do not need their own licence, the real cost is generally lower than a first count of addresses suggests. Full current figures are on our Google Workspace pricing page.