Every website deserves its own email with the domain name in the address. I’m using Bluehost for my wordpress blog which comes with several free email accounts, it’s just up to you to make use of them. You have the option to utilize a free mail client, use an existing one, or forward along any received emails to a personal account. I use Gmail as my primary mail client, and want to enjoy the comfort I have in the application while managing my domain account email, so I’ll be setting up email forwarding. Along with forwarding, I’ll want to have the ability to respond from my Gmail account with my Bluehost domain account email as the sender.

Let’s go over the goals of this post:

• Setup an email with Bluehost
• Forward emails from Bluehost to your Gmail, and setup Gmail to respond as your Bluehost domain account email

Create Your Bluehost Domain Account Email

A domain account email is one where the domain name of your website comes after the @. For example, [email protected]. Looks pretty good, right? Fortunately, this is incredibly easy to setup.

1. Log into your Bluehost control panel, then select the Email tab on the left-hand menu
2. Once selected, enter a solid password (look at that 100/100) and create your account

Now we have a new email address created which can begin receiving emails. Perfect, now let’s forward those emails to a client we’re more comfortable with like Gmail.

Forward Domain Emails to Gmail

When an email is sent to your Bluehost domain account email, a copy of that email will be forwarded along to the email you specify in the below steps. Email forwarding in this case will allow us to avoid having to manage our email through a separate client:

1. Back in the Bluehost cPanel, under the Email tab on the left-hand menu, click Forwarders
2. In the forwarders screen, click the Add Forwarder button. You can also click the Add Domain Forwarder if you’d like to forward any and all emails sent to any Bluehost domain account email you have configured. For now, we’ll stick to just forwarding the one
   
3. Fill in the forwarding email account, then click Add Forwarder
   
   

That’s it, now your domain email account will have its mail forwarded along to your personal account. Give it a shot: email your domain account email and see if your personal gets a copy. This didn’t work immediately for me, there may be a delay for these changes to propagate. If at first it doesn’t work, give it a little while and try again.

Email forwarding is configured, nice work! Now let’s setup our personal Gmail to allow replying as our domain account email.

Replying to Forwarded Emails as the Domain Account

Gmail allows you to setup additional “send as” accounts when composing a new email. By defining another “send as” email account, we can reply to emails that are forwarded from our website domain account email as the domain account email. Let’s set that up:

1. Log into your Gmail account
2. At the top right, click the settings icon , then choose Settings
3. In the settings window, select Account and Import, then Add another email address
4. In the resulting window, enter your domain account email that you’re forwarding from. Leave the Treat as alias checkbox checked, then click Next
5. You’ll be prompted for the SMTP server, username and password. The SMTP server should be your website domain name prefixed with “mail”. For example, mail.storiknow.com. Your credentials will be whatever you use to log into Bluehost.
6. Once authenticated, Google will send a verification email to your domain account email. Log into your Bluehost email client and click the verification email
7. Back in Gmail, compose a new email and verify the newly added account is available in the From field

There you have it. We’ve successfully created a domain account email, forwarded emails to our personal account, and configured our personal account to respond as our domain account. This allows seamless receipt and response!

Sam Storino

Hi, I’m Sam.
I’m a programmer and a DIYer. When I’m not finding things to build I enjoy cooking, hiking, camping and traveling the world with my best friend. Say Hello!