After finding that my name is available as a .com domain, I decided to take the opportunity and buy it. It seemed to be the easiest option, so I elected to get it directly from domains.google.com.

You can have custom email addresses for free

When buying a domain, Google suggests to subscribe to Google Workspaces. Before subscribing I did some research. Turns out that contrary to what Google says, you don’t need Google Workspaces to use custom email addresses (e.g. [email protected]). You can actually have up to 100 of them for free.

Creating a custom email address

Receiving emails

Once you have bought your domain, you have access to a list of your domains. There you can go to the settings of your domain and find the “Email” option. Under “Email forwarding” you can add an alias (your custom email) and forward it to the email address of the google account you used to buy the domain.
That’s it for receiving emails!

Sending emails

To be able to send emails from this custom address, you need to closely follow the next steps.

• Go into your gmail inbox and open all settings. Under “Accounts and Imports” you find a section “Send mail as”. There you can “add another email address”.

• Enter the name and email address and tick the “Treat as an alias” checkbox.

• In the next step, select Port “465”, change the SMTP Server to smtp.gmail.com.

• In the username field enter your email address without the “@gmail.com”. ([email protected] -> username: example).

• Getting the password is a bit tricky. You have to use the “App Password” feature. You need to go into your Google Account settings. There, use the search bar to find “App passwords”. Generate a new app password and copy the displayed password into the password field.

• Finally, press “Add account”.

When sending an email in gmail, you can now select which email address you want to send it from.

🥳 Congratulations, you have just created a custom email address for free.