Domains and email, the part people forget

A website loading correctly at a domain says nothing about whether email addressed to that same domain is arriving anywhere. The two are configured through entirely separate DNS records, they can be hosted with entirely separate providers, and either can be working while the other silently is not — which is exactly the gap that catches out a business setting up a new domain for the first time.

Why a domain name and its email are genuinely two separate things

A website’s location is controlled by A or AAAA records, pointing at the server hosting the site. Email’s location is controlled by a completely different record type, the MX record, pointing at whichever mail server is meant to receive messages for the domain. Nothing about configuring one automatically configures the other — a domain can be registered, its website launched and working perfectly, with no MX record ever set, and mail sent to it simply has nowhere to go.

Why this specific gap is so common

Most attention during a new domain setup goes to getting the website live, because that is the visible, tested part of the launch. Email is frequently assumed to “just work” once the domain exists, or is set up later by a different person entirely — sometimes a different supplier altogether — and the handover between “the website people” and “whoever sets up email” is exactly where an MX record gets missed. Unlike a broken website, a missing MX record produces no obvious symptom to the business: mail sent to the domain typically just disappears, or bounces in a way only the sender notices, while everything the business itself can see continues to look normal.

The three records that actually need to exist for email to work

An MX record, naming the mail server responsible for the domain and its priority relative to any backup server. SPF, DKIM and DMARC records, all stored as TXT records, which authenticate outgoing mail and substantially affect whether it lands in an inbox or a spam folder — covered fully in business email on your own domain. None of these four exist unless someone specifically sets them up; none is a default that comes bundled with registering the domain itself.

Where the mailbox itself lives: professional email hosting vs a free address

The MX record only points to a mail server — it does not decide which email hosting service actually runs that mailbox. Registrars such as GoDaddy commonly sell email hosting alongside the domain registration itself, and Google Workspace (Gmail on your own domain) and Microsoft 365 are the two most common professional email hosts businesses choose instead. All three produce a real business email address at the domain — name@yourbusiness.com.au — rather than a free email account at someone else’s domain. A business that never sets any of this up and instead runs enquiries through a free personal Gmail address is not using the domain’s email at all, and the domain’s MX record sits unused regardless of how correctly the website itself was configured.

When this gap actually gets discovered

Commonly weeks after launch, when a customer mentions they emailed and received no reply, or a supplier notices an enquiry that was apparently sent and never arrived. By that point, an unknown number of messages have already been silently lost, which is what makes this a genuinely costly gap rather than a cosmetic one — unlike a website outage, which is immediately visible, a broken email configuration can run for a long time with the business having no idea anything is wrong.

What to check the day a domain and website go live

Confirm an MX record exists and points at the intended mail provider, send a genuine test email to the domain from an external account and confirm it arrives, and confirm outgoing mail from the domain is not landing in the recipient’s spam folder. This is a five-minute check that catches the single most common and most consequential gap in a new domain setup.

Why this gap is worse for a new domain than an established one

A domain with no sending history at all, newly configured with authentication records for the first time, can take a period to build the reputation that makes receiving mail servers trust it fully — which is a separate, additional reason to get SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured correctly from day one rather than added later once deliverability problems have already been noticed and are harder to diagnose retrospectively.

A five-minute test worth repeating periodically, not only at launch

Sending a genuine test email to the domain, from an entirely separate account, and confirming both that it arrives and that outgoing mail from the domain is not flagged as suspicious by common providers, is worth repeating occasionally rather than checked once and assumed to remain correct indefinitely — a hosting change, a DNS provider switch, or a forgotten record update can each silently break this configuration well after launch.

Why a new supplier should confirm this explicitly, not assume it

Handing a launch checklist to whoever is setting up a new domain, with the MX and authentication records listed as explicit items to confirm rather than implied, closes exactly the handover gap this page describes before it has a chance to occur.

The cost of a missed enquiry, stated plainly

A single genuine business enquiry lost to a silently misdirected email can easily outweigh the entire cost of the checks described on this page many times over, which is worth keeping in mind when this gets deprioritised against more visible launch tasks during a busy project.

Worth checking today, not only at launch

Send yourself a test email to the business address right now — if it does not arrive within a few minutes, this gap already exists and is worth fixing before it costs a genuine enquiry.

Where to go from here

The fuller detail of getting business email working properly on a domain, including the authentication records that affect deliverability, is on business email on your own domain. And what a maintenance arrangement should be checking on an ongoing basis, so a gap like this does not sit unnoticed for months, is set out on what website maintenance costs.