Two kinds of email address
The question tends to arrive at an ordinary moment. You are ordering another run of business cards, or filling in a directory listing, or you have just replied to an enquiry from a firm whose address reads info@theirname.co.uk while yours reads a gmail.com one, and you catch yourself wondering whether the difference matters or is just decoration.
There are two kinds of address in play. The free kind is somebody else's: gmail.com, hotmail.co.uk, outlook.com, or the one that arrived with the broadband, btinternet.com or sky.com. The other kind hangs off your own domain, the name your website and your email share, so it reads you@yourbusiness.co.uk and matches the van, the cards and the site.
Most of the advice at the top of Google argues about what each one says to the customer reading it. That matters, and there is survey evidence for it below, but it is the smaller part of the answer. One of these addresses is rented and the other is owned, and nearly everything that actually goes wrong with business email goes wrong on the rented side.
What a free address quietly costs
Start with the credibility read, properly labelled. In a 2016 survey of 1,000 American adults run by OnePoll for GoDaddy, 75 percent said a domain-based email matching the website was very to extremely important as a trust factor when buying from a small business online, and 33 percent said they doubt the trustworthiness of a seller using a personal email address. Two discounts apply before taking that at face value: the respondents were American adults rather than Lincolnshire ones, and the survey was paid for by a company selling domain email. Even after both, it points the same way as common sense. An address is one of the first things a customer reads about you, and one of the few they read before deciding whether you are real.
The quieter cost is where a free address turns up uninvited. Gmail's "Send mail as" feature will send mail from a domain address through a gmail.com account, and Google's own help page warns that a recipient on Outlook or another mail service may see the true address, in the form "From yourname@gmail.com on behalf of othername@otherdomain.com". The same page says the gmail.com address can appear in out-of-office and other automatic replies. You can print the domain address on everything you own and still have a holiday reply go out signed by a gmail.com one.
And the tenancy can be ended by the landlord. Google may delete a personal Google Account and its contents, including Gmail, if it has not been used or signed into for at least 2 years, a policy whose earliest deletions ran from December 2023. Microsoft's rule is the same shape: sign in to a Microsoft account at least once in a two-year period or it can be treated as inactive and closed. A mailbox in daily use will never trip either one. The address that does is the old one, the personal account the invoices ran through before the business got busy, still holding years of customer threads and still printed on a leaflet somewhere. That is a licence lapsing, and it lapses on the provider's terms rather than yours.
The address that dies with your broadband
The ISP address is the sharper version of the same problem, and it is the one the guides never mention, because most of them are written for readers with no broadband email to lose. Plenty of trades round here still send invoices from a btinternet.com, sky.com or talktalk.net address. That address belongs to the broadband, not to the business.
BT's own terms are the worked example. When BT broadband ends, the customer's btinternet.com address is closed, kept free as Basic email (web browser access only), kept with full features via Premium email at £7.50 a month, or linked to another household's BT broadband. There are 60 days to choose Premium, after which "all of the email addresses linked to your BT ID will be deleted". Other providers write their own versions of this, and the time to read them is before switching rather than after.
Switching broadband for a better deal is an ordinary thing to do, and the email address is rarely part of the decision. It sits on the invoices and the quotes, on the van, in the directories, and in the inbox of every customer who ever wrote to you. When the broadband moves, all of that starts bouncing.
You cannot protect an address you do not own
Then there is the part this site exists for. Fake invoices sent in your name, customers paying a criminal's account because the email read exactly like yours: the whole mechanism is explained in why criminals can send email as your business, and I am not going to re-teach it here. What belongs in this post is the ownership question hiding underneath it. The three records that stop the forgery, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, attach to a domain. A free mailbox borrows Google's or Microsoft's. You cannot put records on a domain you do not own.
Google has turned that from a theoretical point into a practical one. Since 1 February 2024, all senders to personal Gmail accounts must have SPF or DKIM set up for their sending domain, and bulk senders over 5,000 messages a day must have SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Unauthenticated mail "might be marked as spam or rejected". Those are Google's rules for mail arriving at Gmail, but the principle travels: the records live on the sender's domain, so the sender has to own one.
So a free address cannot be protected. The only email you can lock down is email on a domain you own, which is why the £49 one-off email security setup exists as its own service, on your domain, with no website required.
What the owned address takes
A domain and a mailbox, and that is the whole shopping list. The mailbox is the running cost. Microsoft 365 Business Basic costs £5.40 per user per month on an annual subscription, excluding VAT, at the time of writing in August 2026. Prices move, so read the current page rather than quoting this one back in a year. The domain carries its own renewal on top, and that is the whole of it.
It can also be free. Zoho Mail includes a free tier: "free 5GB of storage for up to five mailboxes, plus 1GB of cloud storage". That matters more as a point of principle than as a recommendation, because it takes the money excuse off the table. The domain route does not have to cost anything, so nobody has to keep the free address because the alternative was unaffordable.
Whichever mailbox you choose, the choice is reversible, because the address hangs off the domain rather than the provider. Mailboxes move: export the old mail, bring in the new, repoint the records, and run both for a week. The domain is the part you keep, which is why it is the part worth owning outright. Who owns your domain name covers checking that the domain is registered to you rather than to whoever built your first website, which is the same mistake one layer up.
When a free address is still fine
None of this makes a free address something to be embarrassed about. For personal post, for the village committee, for a side project that has not earned anything yet, a gmail.com address is exactly the right tool, and there is no virtue in paying for something you do not need. The honest cut-off is not about respectability. It arrives the moment the address gets printed on something that will outlast the decision: an invoice, a business card, a door sign, the side of a van.
The mistake worth avoiding is not having a free address. It is letting the free address become the permanent public one. The longer it stays printed, the more the eventual move costs in reprinting and in customers who still have the old one saved, and an ISP address can be taken away by the provider without asking. Set the domain address up first, print that, and let the free one retire to personal use.
How I set this up
For clients of mine this is not a separate project. Domain and business email setup is part of onboarding: the domain is registered in your name, a standard .co.uk or .com is included with every plan, renewal and all, and the mailbox is set up alongside it. The services page sets out what that covers.
The protection side is sold on its own too. The email security work puts SPF, DKIM and DMARC on your domain for £49 one-off including VAT, with no website required, and it is the same setup every site I build ships with. If you read the spoofing post above and recognised your own domain in it, that is the page that fixes it.
The questions that come up
Is a free email address bad for business? Not fatally, and plenty of firms trade for years on one. But it works against you at the exact moment a stranger is deciding whether to trust you, and the ownership problems above are the ones with teeth.
Should my business email match my website domain? Yes. The survey evidence above points that way, but the stronger reason is practical: one domain carrying the website and the email is the setup you can protect, move and hand on.
Can I use Gmail with my own domain for free? Gmail's "Send mail as" will send from your domain address through a gmail.com account, but as covered above, the true gmail.com address can still surface in what recipients see and in automatic replies. If free is the requirement, Zoho Mail's free tier handles a domain address without that catch.
How much does a business email address cost in the UK? The mailbox is the running cost: £5.40 per user per month for Microsoft 365 Business Basic on an annual subscription, excluding VAT, at the time of writing, or nothing on Zoho's free tier. The domain's renewal sits on top, and on my plans both are included.
Do I need a website to have an email address on my own domain? No. The domain and the mailbox stand on their own, and the website can come later. Protecting the address does not need a site either.
Can I keep my email address if I change broadband provider? An ISP address, no, not as of right: it belongs to the broadband, and BT's terms above are what that looks like. An address on your own domain, yes, without ceremony, because the broadband was never part of it.
Can I keep my old address working when I move to the new one? For a while, and you should. Run both, tell the regulars once, and leave the old one receiving for anybody who has not updated yet. The deadline case is the ISP one: BT gives you 60 days to choose Premium when the broadband ends, and after that the addresses are deleted.
Owning the address is half the job. The other half is the records that stop somebody sending email as you, £49 one-off including VAT, on your own domain, with no website required.