How do I set up family email domain?

[WhatEmail]

Does anyone know the best way to purchase a domain that our family can then use to set up our own email addresses?

Ie

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Etc

Say up to 10 addresses.

Thanks!

If you have any kind of common family name then the domain will already be registered by someone else, so you can't. But you can pick a different domain and in any case the rest of this remains true:

Pick a hosting provider (ionos.co.uk has been reliable for me for decades) and register the domain with them.

A side-effect of registering the domain is usually (not always - Ionos does this, but you should check whoever you use) is mail service provision. The hosting company will also allow you to create mailboxes <you-choose>@<your-domain>.com - as many as you like - each with its own password.

You configure each person's email application with the IMAP (incoming mail) and SMTP (outgoing mail) server that the hosting provider tells you to use.

And... that's it.

They'll try to upsell you on more mail storage, spam filtering etc - but it's not needed for the basics.

Total cost is a few pounds a year.

Forgot to say - if you want to use webmail, Ionos has that for each mailbox too, included for free, so you don't have to use a mail application if you don't want to. I don't think it's very sophisticated but it works.

Also, once you've set up the domain, you can configure mail forwarding, so each family member can forward their mail to another email service if they prefer.

Thank you @mushti that is exactly the info I was looking for, very helpful.

Having been caught up in the recent virgin media email problems, I dont want to be worried about that happening again. Do you think there's a risk that something could go wrong with the hosting provider which would result in loss of past messages?

There is always a risk of that with any provider. However, if you are using an email client, rather than relying on webmail, you can keep important emails on your local machine.

I can't speak for other providers, but I have a domain with 123reg, and the way I handle this is I just have them redirect my mail for the email addresses on that domain to my gmail account. IIRC, there was a bit of messing around on the gmail side of things to get that to work, but it's good enough for my needs.

If you use a mail client (that connects via the IMAP protocol) then you will automatically download a mirror copy of each email to your computer for you to read, as well as leaving the copy that is stored with the hosting provider. You can do that on your desktop computer, laptop and (for example) phone, so the same email is stored three times.

Then periodically you can duplicate the emails to a local folder on your desktop computer(only) and delete them from the server.

If your hosting provider loses its data you still have the copies that were automatically made locally.

If you delete an email on one computer then it will automatically be deleted from the other copies of your mailbox (phone, laptop, whatever) next time you collect your mail with one of those other computers.

So you have an archive of your historic emails on your desktop, and three copies of each recent email to refer to whenever you need.