An essential feature to look out for when choosing your hosting plan is if it includes email hosting with it, as not all of them do. This feature allows you to have custom email addresses @yourdomain which to any potential visitors or clients would look far more professional than a gmail or hotmail email address.
This guide is catered for hosting plans that use cPanel control panel which is the most popular control panel among web hosts, however the steps would be very similar with any other control panel provided by your hosting provider. If your hosting provider does not include email hosting with your package do not worry as you can get separate email hosting with another provider or often you can purchase it as an add on with your existing provider.
First things first, head over to cPanel, you will find the link to this in your web hosting control panel or welcome email.
There is a category called ‘Email’in cPanel, under this you will find an option called ‘Email Accounts”. Click this link.
After following the link you should be brought to this page where you can add your email address:
If this is not the first page you see click the ‘Add Email Account’ Tab at the top.
Fill in your desired email address, it can be anything you like. After entering your password you will need to give the mailbox a quota, this is the amount of storage space you are allocating to the email account you are creating. The quota you provide here will depend on your mailbox storage capacity provided by your hosting and the kinds of messages you intend on sending. If you intend on sending and receiving a lot of HD videos you will need significantly more space than a mailbox only being used to send and receive raw text. You can always start of with 250mb-1gb per inbox depending on your allowance to see how you manage with that and then change the allowance or upgrade the storage at a later stage if necessary.
Click ‘Create Account’ and you’re done! Congratulations you have just created your own custom email address. Now you just need a way to access and use this email address.
There are 2 ways you can access your emails:
Using your own mail client such as Outlook, Mail or Thunderbird
To set this up you need to be on the ‘Email Accounts’ tab in the ‘Email Accounts section of cPanel(where you added the new email address. Start by clicking ‘Connect Devices’ and some new links will appear under your email address, you want to click on the ‘Set Up Mail Client’ link.
On older cPanel versions there is no option to ‘Connect Devices’ you just directly click ‘Set Up Mail Client’.
You will after that be brought to a page where you can either click a link to download and automatically install the information required to use your mail client or if your client/device is not supported by the automated install you can find the details to manually key in to your client below.
Via webmail
This allows you to log straight in to your email address without any setup using a web client as if you were signing into gmail or hotmail. To launch webmail you can click the link on the right side of the email address on the page that lists all email accounts as shown below.
You can often access your webmail by simply adding ‘/webmail’ onto the end of your url or by prefixing your domain with ‘webmail.’, this is entirely down to your host though. Normally you will be given the option of 3 web clients when you navigate to webmail: Squirrelmail, Roundcube & Horde. They are all basically the same but I tend to lean more towards Roundcube.