Custom email workflow

An email address on your own domain does two things for you. It reads well, and it gives you as many addresses as you want without a second mailbox.

Your real address is probably ugly

Good usernames went years ago. What is left is your name with a number on the end, a middle initial you never use, or three words stuck together. You made it at sixteen and now it goes on invoices and job applications.

work@narayann.dev has none of that problem, because the only person competing for names on your domain is you.

One inbox, many addresses

A domain gives you unlimited addresses. Hand out a different one per context:

hey@narayann.dev    social
work@narayann.dev   work
buy@narayann.dev    shopping and receipts

All of them arrive in the same Gmail. Filters sort them by the address they were sent to, so the streams stay apart without a second account to log into. When one of them starts getting spam, you know who leaked it, and you can kill that address without touching the others.

How it fits together

Receiving and sending are separate problems with separate setups.

Receiving means pointing the domain's mail records at a forwarder that delivers to your existing inbox, then filtering what lands there. That is routing a custom domain into Gmail, using Cloudflare Email Routing.

Sending means giving Gmail an SMTP relay that is allowed to send as your domain, so replies leave as work@narayann.dev and not as your personal address. That is sending from a custom domain through Gmail, using Brevo.

Do receiving first. The sending setup verifies itself by emailing work@narayann.dev, and you can only open that mail once receiving works. Both halves write DNS records, so expect to be in the same DNS panel twice.