No portal. No ticket number. No manual.
This is every instruction we have, in the order you will need them. Getting your email onto a phone takes about four minutes. Start at the top and stop when it works.
Working hours are Monday to Friday. Order at nine on a Saturday night and the clock starts Monday. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Your web address bought in your name, the mailbox built, and the DNS done properly — MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. That last lot is the difference between an inbox and a spam folder, and it is most of what you are paying for.
We create it, fill it in, pick the right categories and write the description. Two things we need: your business details, and you to finish Google's verification.
Everything above plus your one-page site: who you are, what you do, your real Google reviews, how the job works, how to reach you. Built from your Google profile, so there is no form and nothing to write.
Your welcome email has three things in it: your address, your password and your server name. Keep it open. You need all three below.
It proves the mailbox works before you touch a single phone setting. If webmail lets you in, everything that goes wrong afterwards is a setting, not a fault. That halves the hunt.
It is in your welcome email. Works in any browser, anywhere, on anything.
Bookmark it. It is your back door forever, and the first thing to try if your phone ever stops collecting mail.
Username is hello@yourbusiness.co.uk in full. Not just the bit before the @.
This is the most common mistake there is, and it looks exactly like a wrong password. Paste the password rather than retyping it — capital O and zero are not friends.
The one we sent travelled by email, so treat it as temporary. Change it in webmail settings now.
Do it before you set up your phone, or you will type the old one in and have to do the whole thing twice.
Send a message to your old Gmail or Hotmail, then reply from there and check it arrives.
Out and back is the only test that proves anything. A mailbox that sends but never receives is a completely different fault from one that does neither, and knowing which saves an hour.
Give it a real subject and a couple of real sentences. An empty test email gets treated as spam by every mail system on earth, ours included. We found that out the hard way so you do not have to.
Every app on every device asks for the same four things in a slightly different order. Here they are once. Your server name is in the welcome email; everything below is the same for everybody.
Say IMAP, never POP. IMAP keeps your mail on the server, so the same inbox shows up on your phone, your laptop and webmail. POP drags it onto one device and takes it off the server — lose that device and the mail goes with it. Some apps still offer POP first. Say no.
Outgoing needs the password too. Apps often leave outgoing authentication off, or label it "optional". It is not. Mail arrives fine and nothing you write ever leaves. That is the classic half-working mailbox and it is always this.
About four minutes. Apple moved these settings in iOS 18, so both routes are here. Use whichever one your phone has.
iOS 18 and newer: Settings → Apps → Mail → Mail Accounts.
iOS 17 and older: Settings → Mail → Accounts.
No "Apps" in your Settings means you are on the older one. Then tap Add Account.
Right at the bottom, underneath all the logos. Then Add Mail Account.
People go wrong here by tapping the Google or Outlook logo, because that is what their old email was. Your new mailbox is none of those. It is yours.
Name is what people see when you write to them — your name or the business name. Email is the full address. Password from the welcome email. Description is just a label for you; "Work" does fine.
Two blocks appear: Incoming and Outgoing. Put the server name in both Host Name boxes, and your full address and password in both sets of username and password fields.
Outgoing says "Optional". Ignore that. Leave it empty and you will receive mail all day and never send a single message.
It sits on "Verifying" for up to a minute. A certificate warning almost always means a typo in the server name — go back and read it letter by letter rather than tapping Continue.
Check Mail is switched on, then Save. Send one out and reply back to prove it.
Samsung, Google, OnePlus and the rest all word this differently. The Gmail app is on virtually every Android, so these steps use it — and yes, the Gmail app happily runs a mailbox that has nothing to do with Google.
Tap your profile picture, top right, then Add another account. Some phones send you via Settings → Add account instead. Same destination.
Bottom of the list, under all the logos. Not Google, not Outlook, not Yahoo. Then type your full email address and tap Next.
If it offers POP3, do not take it. If your phone shows Manual setup instead, tap that and pick IMAP on the next screen. Then enter your password.
Android often pre-fills the username with only the bit before the @. Change it to the full address or it will fail.
Server name from the welcome email. Port 993, security SSL/TLS.
Same server name. Port 587, security STARTTLS.
Make sure Require sign-in is ticked, with the full address and password again. Untick it and you have a mailbox that receives but never sends.
Using the Samsung Email app instead? Same four settings, different words. Add account → Other → Manual setup → IMAP account. 993 with SSL in, 587 with STARTTLS out, full address as the username on both. If it offers to "sign in with Google", that is the wrong path entirely.
Same four settings again. Pick your program — or do not bother with one at all.
Type your address, then find Advanced setup or Let me set up my account manually. Let Outlook guess and it will usually try to sign you into Microsoft and fail.
Choose IMAP: 993 SSL/TLS in, 587 STARTTLS out, full address as the username on both.
If it loops asking for a password you know is right, it has saved a half-finished attempt. Remove the account and add it again with Advanced setup from the start. Quicker than fighting it.
Mail → Settings → Accounts → + → Other Mail Account. Name, address, password, Sign In.
When it says it cannot verify the account, that is expected. It just means type the server in yourself. Server name in both boxes, IMAP, done.
Account Settings → Account Actions → Add Mail Account. Name, address, password, then Configure manually.
IMAP 993 SSL/TLS in, 587 STARTTLS out, full address as username on both. Re-test, then Done.
You do not have to install anything. Webmail in a browser does everything a mail program does, on any computer you happen to be sat at, with nothing to set up and nothing to go wrong. Plenty of the businesses we look after never install a thing. There is no prize for a desktop client.
Five faults cover almost everything, and four of them are the same two settings. Work down in order. Stop when it works.
Still stuck? Reply to your welcome email. It reaches a person, not a queue, and it is quicker than anything else you could do.
You can, and plenty do — add the mailbox to the Gmail app using the Android steps above. What we would avoid is Gmail's "send mail as" feature on a free account: it sends through Google's servers rather than yours, which undoes the SPF and DKIM setup you just paid for and puts you in more spam folders, not fewer.
Nothing. It carries on exactly as it did — nobody is switching anything off. Run both for a month or two, tell people the new one, put it on the van and the invoices and the Google profile, and the old one goes quiet on its own. A hard cutover is how you miss a job.
Yes. A second mailbox is another £4.99 a month — but an alias is usually the right answer and costs nothing. An alias is an extra address, like accounts@ or bookings@, that drops into the inbox you already have. One place to look, several ways to be reached. Ask and we will add it.
Plenty for normal business use — years of ordinary mail. What fills a mailbox is attachments, usually photographs of jobs. If you get near the limit we can raise it rather than make you delete things. Tell us before it stops accepting mail, not after.
No. We can reset your password if you are locked out, and that is the whole of our access — the same as any provider has. Your mail is encrypted in transit on every setting above, which is why the ports and the SSL matter and why we will not set a mailbox up without them.
No. The mailbox is a subscription you can cancel whenever you like, and the setup fee is a one-off with nothing recurring hidden inside it.
No. It is registered in your name and you can move it to any registrar you like. We hand over the transfer code without arguing and without a fee. A supplier who holds your web address hostage is telling you something about how the rest of it will go.
It stops collecting new mail and eventually the contents go. So tell us before you cancel — we will help you get your mail out first. Your domain is separate and keeps running regardless.
Because it is Google's process and it is out of everybody's hands, ours included. A postcard takes up to fourteen days; a phone or video check is quicker but they choose which you get, not you. If a postcard has not arrived in a fortnight we will get it re-sent.
No, and we say it plainly because it has caused confusion before. £39.99 buys the domain and the email. The Google profile is a separate £29.99 job.
Tell us and we will fix the page. Phone makers rename these menus every year and we would rather this page was right than looked tidy.
You have just read our entire support process before spending a penny. That was deliberate.