I believe that everyone should have their own domain name, even if you’re not a business.

They’re affordable, give you great practice, creating something you can call your own and help you stand out to employers.

Brief Overview - Email Forwarders VS Aliases VS Mailboxes

If you already have an email address i.e. [email protected] and you want any emails sent to [email protected] to be sent to [email protected] then you’ll probably want what’s known as an email forwarder.

When you reply to forwarded emails though, it will come from your main email address i.e. [email protected].

If you want replies to come from the custom address [email protected], you will need to set that up as an alias.

If you want to keep your personal email address [email protected] and your custom one [email protected] separate, then you’ll likely want a separate mailbox.

Mailboxes usually are a paid, yet affordable offered by many hosting providers including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, however I’ve mentioned a few free-ish ones I’ve found.

Free Forwarding Solutions

Domain / Hosting Providers:

If you have your domain name with a reputable provider such as Namecheap or Porkbun, then they will often offer free email forwarding.

Just have a look in your customer control panel.

Cloudflare:

If you use Cloudflare for your domain’s DNS, you can make use of their email routing feature to forward email.

Just bear in mind that I found issues while testing it with an @outlook.com destination email, since Microsoft were blocking Cloudflare’s IP’s.