This guide will show you how to use Gmail to send and receive emails from a custom domain for free. Google Apps for custom domains used to be free back in the day for domains with less than 10 users. But sadly, now you have to pay $5 a month for that unless you were grandfathered in.

Some other web pages out there also say you can send email for free using Mailgun. But it’s a lot harder and slower to setup and caps the number of emails you can send per month.

Just follow the steps below to enjoy receiving and sending email from a custom domain for free!

1. You must already have a Gmail account, e.g. david@gmail.com.
2. Register a custom domain like example.com with any number of domain registrars like namecheap.com that offers free email forwarding.
3. Setup email forwarding in your domain registrar’s admin console to forward email from a custom email address like david@example.com to david@gmail.com.
4. Go to Gmail’s settings page and click on the “Accounts” section.
5. In the section labeled “Send email as:” click “Add another email address you own.”
6. A pop-up window will appear. Type in your name and custom email address david@example.com.
7. The next page will ask you which email or SMTP servers to use to send email. For this part, you need to have two-factor verification setup with your Gmail account. You need to generate a new app-specific password with two-factor.
8. Fill out the form like so: SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com, Username: david@gmail.com, Password: [app-specific password].
9. Click “add acccount”.
10. The next page will say to enter the verification code in the email sent to david@example.com. Since we setup email forwarding to forward to your Gmail david@gmail.com, just wait a few minutes and you should get the email soon. Type in the code.
11. Tada. You should now be able to send email from david@gmail.com as david@example.com. Just compose a new email and click on the from field. You should see david@example.com as an option.