---
title: Custom email workflow
description: A custom domain gives you an address that reads well and as many aliases as you want, all landing in the inbox you already use.
tags: [email, dns, gmail]
---

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:

```text
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](https://brain.narayann.dev/notes/productivity/email/email-forwarding-spam-fix), 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](https://brain.narayann.dev/notes/productivity/email/gmail-brevo-outgoing), 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.