Business email vs Gmail for a small business

Compared 7 min read

Whether a gmail.com address really costs you work, what an address on your own name buys, and how to change it without losing ten years of mail.

Your email address ends in gmail.com. It has since the day you started, every customer who ever needed you has reached you on it, and nothing has gone wrong. Then a property manager or a supplier says something offhand about it, and you spend an evening wondering whether it has been costing you work.

You may not need to change anything at all.

The comparison is not the one people make

It is never really Gmail against business email. Gmail is a mailbox, and a good one. What is being compared is the part after the at sign.

A free Gmail address puts Google's name there. An address on your own domain puts your business name there, and the mailbox behind it can still be Gmail, if you pay Google to run mail on your name. It can also be your web host's mail, or another provider's. The software and the name are two separate decisions, and people argue about them as if they were one.

So the question to settle is whose name is on the address you hand out.

Does it actually cost you work

Nobody can tell you that honestly, and anybody who gives you a percentage is inventing it.

What is fair to say is where it shows up. A burst pipe at ten at night, nobody reads your address. A quote for a commercial job, an insurance form, a landlord's approved contractor list, a school or a city vendor form: there your address sits on paper next to two other quotes, and somebody who has never met you is reading all three.

So the address matters in the handful of situations where a stranger compares you with others in writing, which is a narrower thing than looking serious.

What paying for it buys

Four things, and only one of them is about appearance.

The name after the at sign is yours, so the address is yours to keep whatever else changes. You can add addresses without adding people, so office@ or accounts@ can exist and be read by you. Mail belongs to the business rather than to a person, which matters the first time somebody leaves. And your own name can be properly signed and vouched for, which is what keeps quotes out of customers' junk folders.

People selling it to you never mention that last one, and it is the one that costs you money when it is missing.

The half-measure that used to work

For years the trick was to buy a domain, forward anything sent to it into your ordinary Gmail, and set Gmail to send back out with your business name in the from line. Free, or nearly.

Forwarding inbound mail is still fine, and plenty of registrars include it. The sending half is where this has gone wrong. Mail systems now check whether a message claiming to come from your name was really sent by something allowed to send in your name, and a personal account sending as your domain often fails that check. The message does not bounce loudly. It lands in junk, or it disappears.

If somebody set this up for you years ago and it worked then, it may not be working now, and the failure is silent.

When keeping the free address is the right answer

If your work comes by phone, from repeat customers and people they told, and you rarely put a quote in writing, a gmail.com address is not costing you anything you can point at. You do not need to pay anyone to fix this. Spend the money on photographs of your work instead.

The same goes if you are three years from handing the business on, or if you are already changing your phone number and your van lettering this month. A change like this is cheap in money and expensive in attention, so do it in a quiet week or do not do it.

The address that is genuinely worth leaving

There is one worse than a free Gmail address, and it is the one at your internet provider or at somebody else's company.

An address ending in your broadband provider's name can die the day you switch broadband, and whether it does varies by provider. Some cut the address off when the service stops. Others let you keep it on conditions: Comcast wants you to have used its webmail in the ninety days before you disconnect and then to sign in at least every nine months, and AT&T currently lets former customers keep theirs. Either way the address sits on somebody else's terms and can be withdrawn, and the switch is usually decided on price by somebody who has forgotten the address exists. An address on your web designer's domain belongs to your web designer, and it stops when the relationship does. Both look like a business address to a customer and behave like a borrowed one to you.

If your address ends in a name that is not yours and not Google's, move it before anything else on this page.

What changing actually costs

A mailbox on your own name costs money every month, and it is small. That is not the cost.

The cost is that your old address is typed into more places than you would guess. Your bank, your insurer, your accountant, three suppliers, your Google Business Profile, the invoicing app, the trade association, the van, the cards in the glovebox, and every login that sends you a code. Miss one and you find out at the worst moment, usually when you are locked out of something on a Sunday.

Change it slowly and on purpose

The safe way is boring. Set the new address up alongside the old one and forward the old one into it, so nothing is missed. Start replying from the new address immediately, because people update their address book from what they see in the from line.

Then update the accounts in order of what hurts most: bank, insurer, anything holding your logins, Google Business Profile, invoicing. Website and printed things last, because they are the ones people notice and the least urgent.

Keep the old mailbox alive for at least a year. Do not close it because you have finished. Close it, if ever, because twelve months went by and nothing important arrived.

A short checklist

Work out whose name is after the at sign today, and whether you control that name
Leave any address ending in a broadband provider or a web company's name
If somebody set up sending as your own name from a free account, test whether it still arrives
Keep the free address if your work comes by phone and you rarely quote in writing
Set the new address up first and forward the old one into it
Reply from the new address from day one so people update it themselves
Change bank, insurer and login accounts before you change the van
Give the old mailbox a year before you even think about closing it

Questions people ask

Does a gmail.com address look unprofessional

To some people in some situations, mostly written ones. Not to somebody whose water is coming through the ceiling. If you never quote in writing, this matters less than you have been told.

Can I have my own name and still use Gmail

Yes. Google sells a paid version that runs mail on your domain with the Gmail you already know. Your inbox looks the same and the address changes.

Is it free to send as my own domain from a personal Gmail account

You can set it up, but mail systems increasingly refuse to trust it, and messages sent that way are often filed as junk without telling either of you.

What happens to my email if I change website companies

Nothing, if the domain is registered in your name and you hold the login. Everything, if it is not. That is the real reason to check who owns the name.

Should the address be my name or something like info@

Use a role address for the one printed on the van, because it survives people coming and going. Use your own name when you are writing to somebody who is deciding between you and two others.

Do I need a separate mailbox for each person

Only for each person who needs their own inbox. Extra addresses that all land in one mailbox are usually free, so office@ and accounts@ can exist without costing anything more.