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I recently came across a blog post by MailChannels which announced that they are now available as a CloudFlare App, which allows their service to be added to CloudFlare in a few clicks.

The biggest highlight in the blog post is the following:-

MailChannels created a special free plan for Cloudflare customers looking to add better spam filtering for a single domain.

For $0/month, you get commercial-grade spam, virus, and phishing protection for up to 5 users.

This is great news for CloudFlare users if you have less than 5 email accounts for your domain and want to use MailChannels professional inbound Spam filtering service.

MailChannels Inbound will remove Spam, phishing and virus from your emails before sending them to your mail or web hosting server.

Besides that, it will also hide or mask your actual mail server IP address which means that attacker will not know the actual mail server IP and thus not able to attack it directly.

To enable this service:-

1. Login to your CloudFlare account and navigate to the MailChannels app.
2. Click Preview MailChannels
3. Click Finish installing onto your site

Once installed, the app will automatically configure the MX records on your domain and redirect your email traffic through MailChannels for scanning.

Accounts are automatically created for the administrator and end-users as you send email traffic.

You may want to forward emails from your custom @yourdomain.com email address to Gmail or another email service like Outlook for easier email management or so that multiple users will receive the emails.

If your email address is created with your web hosting provider, it may be tempting to use their Email Forwarder feature available in their hosting control panel (like cPanel or DirectAdmin) to forward some or all of your emails to another email service like Gmail.

Let me stop you right there with a warning that this is an extremely bad idea!

By forwarding your emails to Gmail, you are also forwarding Spam emails sent to @yourdomain.com to Gmail as well.

From Gmail’s point of view, they are receiving Spam emails from your domain and your email server!

If this continues over time, Gmail will categorize both your domain name and your email server IP as a source of spam, which means that any future emails that you sent will either end up in Gmail’s Spam box or get rejected outright!

Is there a better way to achieve this?

The best way to go about this is to use Gmail’s Check emails from other accounts feature.

This feature allows you to use Gmail to connect to your email server using POP and download the email message to Gmail, sort of like how an email client like Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird works.

Alternatively, you can also use a service called ImprovMX which allows you to setup email forwarding in seconds and start receiving and sending emails with your domain name, absolutely free.

You can setup email addresses with your own domain and have it forward to your personal or specially created email address at Gmail, Outlook or anywhere else.

So you have registered a domain name of your own and you now want to create a custom @yourdomain.com email address?

There are generally three ways for you to achieve this:-

1. Sign up for a web hosting service and create your email account(s) with your hosting provider’s control panel.
2. Use an email forwarding service by your domain registrar (if supported).
3. Sign up for an email hosting service like G Suite or Office365 account which starts from $6 USD per month.

What if there’s a better way to achieve this?

I’ve been using a service called ImprovMX which allows you to setup email forwarding in seconds and start receiving and sending emails with your domain name, absolutely free.

You can setup email addresses with your own domain and have it forward to your personal or specially created email address at Gmail, Outlook or anywhere else.

You can also send emails using Gmail’s SMTP under your @yourdomain.com email address which is pretty cool.

If you are concerned about privacy, feel free to take a look at their Privacy Policy, GDPR Compliance and details about what do they log.

One thing you will want to keep in mind is that no matter which email provider you choose, you will need to be able to trust them as your email messages will pass through their servers.