You can start sending with a Gmail, Outlook or Hotmail address, or with a ready-made SeekaHost address. But if email is part of how your business grows, sending from a domain you own - you@yourcompany.com - is the single biggest thing you can do for deliverability. Here's why.
Reputation belongs to the domain in your From address
Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and every other inbox provider decide where your campaign lands - inbox, Promotions, spam, or nowhere - largely on the reputation of the domain it comes from. That reputation is built from how recipients treat your mail over time: whether they open it, reply, move it out of spam, or mark it as spam.
When you send from your own domain, every good campaign adds to a reputation that is yours. It follows you if you change email provider, and nobody else's behaviour can damage it.
Think of it this way
A personal Gmail account is like posting letters with your name on a well-known courier's envelopes. The courier delivers its own customers' everyday post happily, but it was never built to carry thousands of identical business letters, and it has no way to vouch that a bulk delivery really came from you. Your own domain is your own letterhead: recipients recognise it, and it collects a track record of its own.
What happens when you send from a free address
When we send your campaign, it is signed by the sending service rather than by Google or Microsoft. Receiving servers check whether the domain in your From address vouches for that mail - a check called DMARC. A free mailbox provider can't vouch for mail it didn't send, so that check always fails. What happens next depends on the provider's published policy:
- Gmail, Outlook and Hotmail currently publish a relaxed policy, so mail still gets delivered - but it carries a failed check that inbox filters take into account, and it competes on the provider's reputation rather than yours.
- Yahoo and AOL publish a strict "reject" policy, and iCloud a "quarantine" one, so mail sent from their addresses through any other service bounces or goes straight to spam. That's why we don't accept those addresses as sending addresses at all.
- Providers can tighten their policy at any time. One that delivers today may start sending your campaigns to spam, or rejecting them, without warning - which is the risk you take on by sending as an address on someone else's domain.
On top of that, Gmail and Microsoft both apply stricter rules to anyone sending more than a few thousand emails a day to their users, and passing DMARC is one of them. As your list grows, a free address becomes harder to deliver from, not easier.
Your three options
When you add a sending address - during setup or later from Settings → Email - you'll choose one of these:
- Use my own domain (recommended) - send as you@yourcompany.com once you've published a few DNS records. Your mail is signed as your domain, passes DMARC, and builds reputation that belongs to you.
- Use a SeekaHost address - ready to send straight away, with nothing to set up. Your mail is signed and authenticated by our domain, and replies come back to you. A good way to start while you sort out a domain.
- Use my email address - send as your Gmail, Outlook or Hotmail address after clicking a confirmation link. Convenient, but with the limits described above.
Don't have a domain yet?
A domain costs little and takes minutes to register. Once you have one, you also need somewhere for replies to arrive - an inbox at that domain. The usual ways to get both:
- Register a domain with SeekaHost, or any registrar, and add email hosting to it.
- Use the email that comes with your website hosting - most hosts include mailboxes on your domain.
- Use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 to keep the Gmail or Outlook inbox you're used to, on your own domain.
If you just need replies to reach the inbox you already use, many registrars offer free forwarding from you@yourcompany.com to your existing Gmail or Outlook address. That's enough for sending through us: we only need the domain's DNS records, not a mailbox on it.