Setting up my custom domain with an SMTP provider

I wanted to use a custom email address linked to this domain, and sought to find out how.

Why?

I initally just went with Email Routing through Cloudflare after registering my domain with them. While it does a good job of email forwarding, I also wanted to be able to send emails from a custom address linked to my domain.

How?

I found Migadu while going down a Reddit rabbit hole on SMTP providers. Initially I went with Brevo but seemingly it prevented me from setting up a simple account for supposed spam reasons, even though I never set an account with them before.

It involved setting up my domain with Migadu and manually entering the DNS records provided into Cloudflare. The records included TXT (unique verification of domain ownership to prevent hijacking), MX (Mail exchanger), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) for email auth through public cryptography, Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) and SPF. Optional were the DMARC and Autoconfig/Autodiscovery. I manually entered these into Cloudflare's DNS records for my domain.

Afterwards, I followed the guide to configure Migadu with Apple Mail. I had some difficulty with the ports here and wound up just automatically setting it with Mail, as manual port setting didn't work.

Migadu then asked to confirm by running tests and now I'm able to send/receive emails with my custom domain! I also set up an alias to put on my CVs.

• Learning Curve: Not quite but manually having to enter each DNS record into Cloudflare, fine for one website but probably would be a hassle if I had multiple domains.

• Challenges: Some difficulty with setting up the DKIM record - I had to turn off the proxy in Cloudflare to successfully set it up.

Conclusion

Learned a bit about setting up an SMTP server/provider with a custom domain!