The gmail address is costing you work

Most tradesmen we meet have been using the same email address since about 2010. It works. Mail arrives, quotes go out, jobs get done. Nobody has ever said a word about it.

So this is not a telling off. If somebody handed you an address fifteen years ago and it has carried your business since, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to still be using. It is worth twenty minutes of your time, though, and here is what it actually changes.

What it says to the person reading it

Two people read your email address properly, and both of them are deciding something at the time.

The first is a builder or a property manager choosing between two subs. He has a quote from you and a quote from somebody else. The prices are close. One address is at a company domain and one is at gmail. It will not be the reason he picks, but it is a thumb on the scales, and it goes against the man whose business looks like it is run out of a pocket rather than an office.

The second is a homeowner about to let somebody into the house while she is at work. She is not assessing your technical competence. She is asking a simpler question: is this a real business, and will it still be there if something goes wrong in two years. A domain is not proof of that. It is just one of the half dozen small things she adds up, along with the van, the paperwork and whether you turned up when you said you would.

Neither of these people will mention it. That is the awkward part. You do not get told you lost a job for this, so there is nothing to learn from.

The parts nobody mentions

The signalling is the argument everyone makes. The practical problems are the ones that actually bite, usually at the worst moment.

You do not own it. The account belongs to the provider. If it is ever suspended, locked, or caught by an automated security sweep, you do not have an account manager to ring. Every live job, every quote, every photograph a customer sent you of the leak, all of it sits behind that login.

You cannot hand it over. If you take on an apprentice, bring in a partner, or hire somebody to answer the phone, there is no way to give them part of it. Sharing one password is not delegation, and it means the person you just hired has your personal mail too.

You cannot split it up. With your own domain you can have info@ for general enquiries, accounts@ for invoices, and your own name for anything that should come to you. One address for all three means quotes and invoices and your mother live in the same inbox, and the invoice is the one that gets missed.

You cannot take it with you. The address is tied to the provider, not to you. Your domain is yours. If you ever change email providers, you keep the address and the history.

The deliverability bit, briefly

This one is invisible, which is why it is worth knowing about.

When you send mail from your own domain, there are three records that tell the receiving system the mail is genuinely from you: SPF says which servers are allowed to send as you, DKIM signs the message so it cannot be altered on the way, and DMARC tells the receiver what to do if the first two fail. Set up properly, they are the difference between landing in a builder’s inbox and landing in his junk folder.

You cannot have any of that on a free address. The mail is from the provider’s domain, mixed in with everybody else’s, and the corporate filters that large builders and property managers run are tuned to be suspicious of exactly that. This matters most for the quote you send to a company you have never emailed before, which is to say the new business.

If you want the plain version: proper records do not guarantee delivery, but not having them is a handicap you are carrying for no reason.

You do not have to give up your old address

This is the part that stops most people, and it should not.

Forwarding means every message sent to the old address still arrives, in the same place it always did. Nobody has to be told anything. The customer from 2014 who only has the gmail can keep using it for the next ten years and you will never miss a job because of it.

What changes is what you hand out: on the van, on the quote, on the website, in the signature. New work sees the new address. Old work keeps working. There is no moment where mail goes missing, which is the fear that keeps people on an address they have outgrown.

What to put before the @

Keep it short and keep it obvious.

info@ is the safe default for the address you publish. It survives staff changes, it can be read by more than one person, and nobody has ever been confused by it.

Your first name works well for a one or two man operation, and it reads warmer than info. joe@joeselectric.com is a person, and people prefer ringing a person.

sales@ reads oddly for a small firm. It implies a sales department, and when the same bloke turns up in the van it feels like a costume. Save it for when it is true.

Avoid anything with a number in it, anything that needs spelling out on the phone, and anything that is a joke. You will be reading it aloud in noisy places for years.

What it costs, honestly

A mailbox on your own domain is a few dollars a month per person at the main providers. Google Workspace is the one most people have heard of and it starts at about seven dollars a month per user, checked in September 2026. There are cheaper options that work perfectly well for one or two mailboxes.

The domain itself is usually somewhere between ten and twenty dollars a year if you do not already have one.

So the real cost is not the money. It is the twenty minutes of setup, plus telling your phone and your laptop about the new account.

And here is where we talk ourselves out of a sale: if you already have a domain and a website you are happy with, you do not need us for this at all. Your hosting or domain provider almost certainly sells mailboxes, your website person can point the records at them in ten minutes, and the whole job is done for the price of a coffee a month. Ask them before you ask anyone else.

If you have no domain and no website, a Ramp site is $249 to build and comes with email forwarding on your own domain, so the address works from day one. Mailboxes you can actually send from come with any of the monthly plans, or you can buy them yourself from any provider you like. We are not precious about which.

The twenty minute version

If you want to do this today, in order:

1. Register the domain if you do not have one. Your business name, .com if it is free.
2. Pick a provider and create one mailbox. info@ or your first name.
3. Set the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records. Every provider gives you the exact lines to paste, and it is copy and paste, not configuration.
4. Set your old address to forward to the new one. Do not close it. Do not ever close it.
5. Change the address on your quotes, your invoices, your van, your voicemail and your Google Business Profile.
6. Send yourself a test from your phone and check it arrives from the right name.

That is the whole job. The only step people skip is the third one, and it is the one that decides whether your quotes land in the inbox or the junk folder.

What this is not

Changing your email address will not bring you work on its own. Nobody has ever hired a plumber because of a domain name.

What it does is stop a small number of jobs leaking away for a reason you will never be told about, and it makes everything else you do look like it belongs to the same business. If you are also getting a website, do them together and you will never think about it again.