I am sorry if this is a really simple and stupid question… a topic yesterday as well as the sponsors on today’s MPU has really got me thinking about buying a domain for the family and each of us having an @domain email address…
Other than going onto Hover and buying a domain, how do I go about setting up email mailboxes? Or is this not cheap to do…
Hover offers a turnkey solution for this, but you could also get the domain from them and then use a separate email service like Fastmail or G Suite.
Thank you. So you do pay per user… even for me and the wife that’s $100 a year?! Plus the domain… Maybe this is not such a good idea!
G-Suite basic is about $8 per user per month.
Hover basic emails are way cheaper.
I’ve got an old free (no longer available) g-suite account that lets me have 5 email addresses.
Having an email just bounce to a gmail address, without being stored on your custom domain should be a service you can find for a low price (but I don’t know where - sorry)
You can definitely set up your normal gmail to send out emails with your custom email address as the sender.
You could start by reading this article.
However, and I definitely don’t want to be rude, perhaps getting your own domain for e-mail is not the right thing (yet) if you don’t know what you’re doing. It might cost you more money than necessary.
Looking at Hover, the email solution linked to a domain you get from them seems the simplest way to go. I have no idea about the quality of the spam filtering, power tools etc. I personally have used Fastmail for the past 15 years and love what I can do with it. (But I’m not a normal email user and my family members have no need of that configurability.)
If price is a concern, Hover’s $5/yr email forwarding is the way to go. Keep your gmail or iCloud or whatever you like these days (and your individual family can as well.) Forward mail from that address to your preferred service - and if you want - configure your service to send mail with your custom domain. It’s a one time setup and forget it sort of thing for most people. And for a family of four, it’s the same price as a regular small hosted account for a single person.
I host my extended family’s email on an old 250 account GSuite account that I got for free a while ago. I’ve thought about moving to something more privacy focused, but none of them want to change how they get their mail, and I don’t want to pay for something that satisfies my preferences but doesn’t matter to them at all. If I were doing this today, I’d set up the forwarding service for each the family members and call it a day.
If price wasn’t as much a concern (and people didn’t mind using a regular client to get their mail) Hover’s small mailbox service should be plenty for most people.
That is brilliant. Thank you so much.
Now to decide on the best domain!!!
My math may be fuzzy here, but I’m seeing $20/mailbox for two mailboxes (you and your wife), plus a domain - maybe $55-$70 total per year, roughly, including the domain?
If you’re already paying $5 per address for forwarding, it’s only another $30 for 2 email boxes that are real email boxes. I’ve found that forwarding can be a little bit sketchy / unreliable, and having actual boxes on the server the mail initially goes to is a Good Thing. 
One benefit of having your own domain that hasn’t been mentioned: a drastic reduction in the amount of spam you’ll receive.
And you control your email and account!
You are quite correct. I wrote that in haste after seeing the fastmail pricing!
I’ve used the Hover email service, and in general I was pretty happy with it. I’m at Fastmail now due to better server-side filtering, but for somebody on a budget that’s not moving tons of stuff around via email the Hover “small” mailboxes are perfectly fine.
The only little quibble I had with them was that if you don’t like their built-in spam filtering, you can’t disable it last I checked - but you can make a quick rule that delivers anything marked as spam to your inbox. And then you can use your own filtering. 
Every time I tell somebody that my email address is my first name @ my last name .ca, I am happy. When somebody mentions that is great or cool, my tail wags even harder.
With a surname of Welsh I am having very little luck…
Quick warning on Hover’s $5 email forwarding. There’s a secret spam folder that you don’t have access to. I recently didn’t get a forum activation email, had to go in to support. I hope they decide to invest in improving the product, but I feel it won’t match features of the other providers.
I was interested in migadu.com email. They just changed their pricing though and it’s not as attractive as it once was. There’s a limit of in/out per day. But you can create as many accounts per domain as you want.
There is also Migadu that offers a flat rate for as many mailboxes as you want as long as you don’t exceed their limits. Works well for me so far.
I am a big fan of Fastmail for this. Wife and I use it for personal with domains. Has nice CalDav and CardDav support to we also use it for contacts/Cal sharing etc.
Ugh. I just found MXroute. Which looked like a good place where I can have multiple accounts sharing space, like an email family plan. But I asked some questions and their response really rubbed me the wrong way. There first response was basically “if you can’t find your answer on the front of our website, you’re probably not happy with us as a provider, and therefore we shouldn’t do business.” I pressed them a bit, giving them a second chance to read my questions (which I directed to sales), but they basically doubled down on their if you can’t find the answer on our website we don’t want you as a customer.
That’s terrible!! Good way to run a business.