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You’ve Got Mail: WPMU DEV Hosting, now with Free Email!

Tutorials

By N. Fakes 29 Apr 2020
37 comments

You asked for it, and we’ve delivered. Every WPMU DEV hosting account now comes with 5 free email accounts.

You asked for it, and we’ve delivered. Every WPMU DEV hosting account now comes with email hosting and 10 free email accounts.

There’s not even postage required. While we’ve had email forwarding for some time, you asked us for regular free at your domain email, like [email protected], that your users and clients could hook up to Outlook, Apple Mail or their favorite email client.

WPMU DEV UPDATE  — OCTOBER 2020 CHECK OUT THE NEW HUB TABS!

Well, our awesome developers have packaged it all up for us and now we’re letting email out of its (in)box.

Dev Man with hosting and email DNS envelope.
Dev Man is pretty excited about getting his new email option.

This article covers what’s included, how it works, and everything you need to know to set up your new free email accounts.

Creating Fresh New Email Accounts

So just to reiterate, each site hosted with us comes with 10 free email addresses that you can create right in The Hub 2.0 with just a few clicks.

And then easily configure using our DNS manager (you can expect that to be automated in the very near future too).

Here’s how it’s done.

First, from the Hub, select the domain that you’d like to add email to. Then, you’ll click Hosting > Emails.

Where emails are located in the Hub.
Where emails are located in the Hub.

From this point, click on Add Email Account.

Create new email account.

Once you click on Add Email Account, you’ll be prompted to enter an Email and a Password.

We generate some very secure, but slightly odd, passwords for you :)

Add a new email.
Where you’ll create a new email account.

When it is successfully created, you’ll get access to all required DNS records, which includes the name, type (e.g. MX), host, and value.

Which you can simply add to your preferred DNS provider (yet another hint if you didn’t get it the first time: use us to make it super, super easy)

All of your created email accounts will now appear in the Emails area and can be accessed at any time.

Configuring Your Email Client

Once you’ve created your email you’ll want to add it to your email client of choice.

To help you out we’ve  a bunch of guides for all the popular email clients that you can find here.

Specifically, here’s how to set your new free email accounts up with:

And, of course, if you get stuck then you can just chat with our friendly 24/7 live expert support who will help you until you are sorted.

Free Email Hosting vs Forwarding

If you need to be able to receive emails from your custom domains, another way of doing that is by email forwarding. Which we’ve allowed you to do with an unlimited number of emails for some time :) In fact it’s what I’ve been doing with all my hobby sites.

Email forwarding is basically re-sending emails received by one email address to another email address.

It works great with email providers like Gmail, so say if I want to send email from [email protected] I can forward that to [email protected] and then configure Gmail to ‘send as’ [email protected]… easy, quick and effective.

However, it does not let you log into [email protected] using outlook or your iphone mail app.

Whereas these new free email accounts do.

Any restrictions?

Basically, no :)

We don’t provide web mail with these accounts  (I mean honestly, as much as we love them in principle, who actually uses Horde?) so you’ll have to use your own client.

But other than that, you’re good to go. No holds barred.

Or Should I Use Professional Email?

As discussed (and as I’m sure you already knew), email comes in many flavors.

For most of us (and our clients and users), these free email accounts and forwarding email will do the job.

But if you’re looking for a more feature rich and industrial strength email solution you should consider a third party provider like G Suite or Zoho  (and if you are a charity or a non-profit then you almost certainly should consider G Suite for non-profits as it’s free!)

These solutions basically ramp up your ability to send lots of emails, host lots of accounts, increase deliverability and, of course, provide you with a bunch of other tools.

But, as I mentioned, for the majority of us we hope our free email hosting and forwarding tools will do the job!

And as mentioned in the article, we have 24/7 support, documentation, and any help you may need along the way.

So, put those stamps away. You won’t be needing them here. We’ll deliver (postage free) with our hosting and using email with your domain.

We hope you like this :) Please let us know how you find it and anything else we can do for you in the land of email, in the comments!

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