Free email accounts may not give you a competitive edge in your business because they don’t look professional. Free email accounts like those offered by Google and Yahoo are absolutely great for personal emails but self-hosted email solutions are the norm for businesses.
If you have a domain name and a hosting space, you might consider running emails that point back to your main website. For instance, you can have an email address like sales@yourdomain.com or billing@yourdomain.com. These emails look non-spammy especially if you are collecting payments on your website.
In this guide, we are going to discuss the steps for creating your own personal emails and point them back to your preferred email client e.g. Ms Outlook.
Prerequisites
- A domain name e.g. www.example.com
- A web hosting plan that supports cPanel
Step 1: Log on to your cPanel Account
cPanel offers a great Graphical User Interface (GUI) for automating linux commands. Most shared hosting companies provide this feature at no extra cost. To access cPanel, visit the URL below replacing ‘example.com’ with the main domain name associated with hosting account.
You will be prompted to enter your username and password as show below:
Ensure the details are correct and click on ‘Log in’ to proceed. You are now on the dashboard of your cPanel account.
Type ‘email’ at the search box and click on ‘Email Accounts’ on the drop down list box as shown below
Step 2: Create a new email account
You will see an option to create a new email account on the next screen as shown below:
Enter the correct details and click on ‘Create Account’ as shown above. In our case, we typed ‘billing’ and the “@example.com†part is already filled in for us. Keep these details safe, we will need them later when configuring an email client.
Your account is now functional and can find it at the bottom of the screen on the list of emails.
Step 3: Configure an email client
You can either decide to manage your emails directly from cPanel or by setting up an email client. If you opt for the former, just locate your email account on cPanel, then at the bottom right, click on the ‘More’ link and select ‘Access Webmail’ as shown below. You can then choose a web mail client from the list that appears on the next screen e.g. Round Cube or Squirrel Mail.
If you want to configure an email client, click on the ‘Set up Mail Client’ as shown below:
Navigate to ‘Mail Client Manual Settings’ on the next screen
In this part, we are interested on the incoming and outgoing server addresses and ports under ‘Secure SSL/TLS Settings (Recommended)’
We need to add these details on our email client.
For instance in Ms Outlook 2007, Navigate to Tools->Account Settings
Under ‘emails’ click on ‘New’ and enter your name and the email address that you created above as well as your password. Then select the check box, “Manually configure server settingsâ€
On the next screen, select ‘Internet Email’ and click ‘Next’
Next, enter the details that you corrected under ‘Mail Client Manual Settings’ on your cPanel account. These include; your email address, incoming mail server, outgoing mail server, username and password. Please note: your username is the same as your email address as shown below:
Then click on ‘More Settings’ at the bottom right.
On the next screen, select the Outgoing Server tab and select the below options.
Then click on the ‘Outgoing Server’ tab and set the correct incoming and outgoing server ports. Also check the box that reads, “This server requires an encrypted connection (ssl)†and select SSL as the encrypted connection type as shown below.
Click ‘OK’ then ‘Next’ to continue, finally click the ‘Finish’ button. You can now send and receive emails from Outlook.
Conclusion
Professional self-hosed emails are a big plus to your business. They simply show your customers that you are serious with what you are offering to them. In this guide, we have provided the steps you require to create an email address on your cPanel and configuring the same on Ms Outlook.
There is so much that you can do with the email. You might consider configuring it on Thunderbird if you are running Ubuntu on your local computer. You may repeat the same procedure for any additional email address that you want to create. It is that easy!
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