Small Business Tech – Create a Free Custom Domain Email with Yandex

The aim of How to Learn.me isn’t only to learn but to put what you’ve learned to work/action, and that’s why a new series of posts will be launched about technology for small businesses and how a small business/startup can use free available tools to streamline workflow and make their job easier, faster and in a more professional way.

The first post in this series will focus on creating a free custom domain email, in other words if you own the domain MyGreatBusiness.com how would you create the email xx@MyGreatBusiness.com not only to make your communication more professional but also to control the communication for you and for those who are working with you.

There are a many posts online covering this topic (most of them are out of date, and most of the services in these posts are paid now), but this post won’t only focus on services that would only provide you with free email but also some other additional services like document creation and collaboration, presentation creation and collaboration, billing and CRM, etc.

The first service through which you can create free custom domain email is Yandex. Yandex is a major search engine in Russia, through Yandex users can create custom domain emails for up to a 1000 accounts not only that, Yandex also provides you with free cloud storage with every email account (Yandex Disk), you can also create, edit and collaborate on documents, presentations and spreadsheets using this service. What is unique about Yandex services is that the documents, presentations and spreadsheets are created with office online without a Microsoft account but through your custom domain email on Yandex. Now without further ado let’s dive into the guide:

Step One

First, you need to visit Yandex to start the signup process.

Step Two

You will be prompted by a message informing you that you need to be logged in in order to perform this action.

Step Three

Just click on the green link, you can login using your facebook, twitter or Google account (that didn’t work for me) so I’ve created a Yandex account and signed in with it.

Step Four

Now, you’ll have to verify ownership of the domain, that can be done through various methods, the easiest (from my point of view) is through the CNAME DNS record, the second option and that’s the method used in this guide.

Step Five

Setting up the CNAME in the DNS records varies from one domain registrar to another, I’m using Hover in this guide so just click on add a new record and select CNAME for the record type and fill in the information using the data provided by Yandex in the previous step. then click on the verify domain ownership tab seen also in the screenshot above. It will take some time (even a couple of hours) to be able to verify, so just be patient.

Step Six

Now you need to setup the MX records to setup the email, this can be done either through the CPanel (or any other server management solution) or through your domain registrar panel, I’ll be using the registrar panel in this guide, first get Yandex records using the information provided by Yandex as seen in the screenshot below.

Step Seven

In your domain registrar panel just edit the MX records using the information from Yandex seen above.

Now you can create your email and log into your account as seen below, you can also add more emails and administer them from a central panel.

Now, for the services layer you get with this free email, in the disk section, as stated previously you can create, edit and collaborate on documents, presentations and spreadsheets using office online as seen below.

This is the first free method by which you can create a custom domain email, in the following guide another method will be provided to create a free custom domain email, again with a layer of services that’s very helpful for small businesses.