Setting up a custom domain on Skiff

Adding a custom domain unlocks a more personal, professional email address. How can you setup custom domains on Skiff?

After months of anticipation: Custom domains are out.In this blog, we’ll cover how custom email domains work, and how to set up Skiff to send and receive mail from your own personal domain name.Now, on your Skiff email account, you’ll be able to add custom domains for your personal account and for your workspace, so your family, business, or colleagues can all share a domain name. This custom domain name gives new power to your personal or professional email address - taking your email into a new domain of productivity. No matter whether you’re using ethereum.email, yourdomain.com, bud.net, or example.com, your domain will add a new level of professionalism, customization, and personability to your communications.

Overview

Custom email domains are a great way to promote your brand and give your customers a professional way to communicate with you. By using a custom email domain, you can show your customers that you are a professional business that they can trust, or an individual with a domain linked to your personal site (like @skiff.com!).Custom email domains also give you the ability to separate personal and professional email communications. This can be a valuable tool for customer service, professional communications, or maintaining your personal identity across email providers.

Setting up a custom domain on Skiff

To start, you’ll need to upgrade to a Pro or Business tier. For more information about tiers and pricing, visit our plans page. Currently, Pro tier users can set up two distinct custom domains, and Business tier users can add up to five.If you’re looking to try out Skiff’s custom domain feature, you can also collect a generous amount of credits (for downloading mobile apps, referring other users, or importing files). At this point, you can subscribe from the Plans page in-app and add your own domain name.Now, once you’re on a Pro or Business tier, navigate to the “Custom Domains” settings tab inside Skiff Mail. If you choose not to upgrade, you can still use Skiff as a free email client with 10 GB of free storage.From there, click “setup” to start the custom domain setup process and enter in the domain that you want to use for Skiff Mail. Note that you can use any hosting provider, and you can also enter a subdomain into this field (a subdomain will be treated as a distinct domain under paid plans, as every subdomain requires distinct DNS records).Now, Skiff Mail will take you to a new page displaying different DNS records that you will need to configure on your domain or subdomain. This includes multiple records for different purposes, including both TXT and MX records. MX records are used to forward sending email to different servers and are critical for ensuring that you can properly receive mail at your custom domain email addresses. So, when another mail server (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or another provider) is trying to send mail to your Skiff account, it will look up the MX record on your domain and forward mail to Skiff’s inbound SMTP servers.Each web hosting provider will have a different user interface for configuring DNS records. Typically, you will need to select a record type (MX, TXT, CNAME), then a subdomain it applies to (such as “_dmarc”), and a value. For MX records, you will also need to add a priority, which should be zero for a Skiff custom domain. Your domain registrar will likely have documentation on how to add these DNS records, but, if you need any assistance, contact us at [email protected].It’s also possible to set up your custom domain from the Skiff Mail mobile app. After clicking the gear icon to open settings in the top right corner, click the Custom Domains section to start the same setup process as the desktop app.

What are the DNS records?

Below, we’ll give an overview of the DNS records that you need to add for your custom domain. Hosting companies may differ in how their DNS record setup works, but every registrar will have configuration options for MX, TXT, and CNAME records that are all critical for your email setup. Note that you should not have to pay for any special hosting plan to add these records; any basic hosting provider should allow you to add any DNS record configuration.MX record: As described above, the MX record describes where to send mail when sent to your custom domain. Depending on your choice of email hosting service, you’ll need to update an MX record that indicates that mail should be sent to that server.TXT records: TXT records are helpful for attesting domain ownership, as well as implementing the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC). SPF ensures that other individuals cannot spoof your domain when sending emails by limiting the mail servers that can send external mail from your domain.DMARC records are also helpful in domain spoofing. Setting up a DMARC policy for your domain gives external email providers more information about your domain’s security posture, such as whether you are using DKIM and SPF to validate external mail. A DMARC policy will tell these providers what to do if SPF, DKIM, or other validation steps fail - such as completely rejecting an email.CNAME records: CNAME records are used for DKIM verification. DKIM records store a public key associated with your domain. A sending email server will create a digital signature on email headers and a hash of the email body, thereby validating that your domain owner is actually sending a particular email.

Buying a domain name

We won’t go into great detail about how to buy a domain name, but we recommend purchasing a name online through a well-respected, privacy-focused registrar (more information coming in a future blog). Generally, you cannot get a free domain name, but using a web hosting company (such as Webflow) can sometimes reduce the hosting costs as they can be done via the hosting provider.If you are looking for more customizability, you can choose a domain name yourself and set up your website later. Your domain registrar will have configuration pages for DNS records (see more info above), SSL (which is critical for security), SEO, and other important settings.

End-to-end encrypted on Skiff Mail

All incoming mail from external mail servers, including mail with your custom domain, is immediately end-to-end encrypted when received with your public key.If you’re currently using a custom domain with your free Gmail (i.e. gmail.com) or your Google account, Outlook, or another email provider, you may be sacrificing your privacy as email is received unencrypted, or subsequently encrypted with a key owned by big tech. On Skiff, this isn’t the case. All receive mail is encrypted on receipt with a public key where only a user can decrypt messages, making your family, small business, or enterprise more confident and capable of using email effectively.

Personal or business email use

Custom domains provide critical usability for both personal and business purposes. Almost all business with an online presence need to support business email addresses for their organization, whether that’s on G suite, Microsoft Outlook, or another mail client.Today, Skiff becomes a first class alternative to a full workspace email solution. If you add a custom domain on the Pro or Business tiers, your other workspace members will also be able to add aliases from that domain, giving your entire organization access to a new email address personalized for your business name.This same use case is critical for family usage as well, where multiple members of a family will want to have shared email addresses at different custom email addresses on a single domain.Custom domains are also helpful because they give you a single email address to use over many years, regardless of the email client that you choose. So, if you choose to migrate from a Gmail address to Skiff Mail, you can maintain the same domain setup without telling your contacts to use a new address. Alternatively, if you choose to set up a custom domain, you can still setup email forwarding to your new email with ease (check out our blog on 10 tips for setting up a new email address).

Questions?

We hope this step-by-step tutorial was helpful and informative. If you run into any trouble setting up your custom email domain on Skiff, please email us at [email protected], or reference more docs on our blog.You can also communicate with us on any of our online communities, including Discord, Reddit, or Twitter.