Picking Your Business Email Is Really Picking Everything Else
Most business owners pick their email in about five minutes. It usually happens on day one, somewhere between registering the business and ordering business cards. You use whatever came with your internet service, or the Gmail account you already had, and you move on to the hundred other things that feel more urgent.
That's completely normal, and plenty of solid, successful businesses started exactly that way.
In our last post, What Does a Solid IT Foundation Look Like?, we walked through the building blocks every business needs. The first one on that list was email and identity, and this post is the deep dive on it. If you haven't read that one, no worries. This one stands on its own.
Here's my take, and I'll own that it's an opinion: in my experience, no other single IT decision locks in as much as this one. When you pick an email provider, you're really picking the platform a lot of your business ends up built on. Think of it as the slab. Much of what comes later gets poured on top of it, so it's worth making sure it's level before you start building.
It's never just email
When you sign up for business email with Microsoft or Google, you get a lot more than an inbox. Depending on the plan, the same account also runs your calendar and contacts, your documents and spreadsheets, and your video meetings and team chat. Your files get stored and synced there too, so the proposal you started at the office is waiting on your laptop at home. On some plans it can lock or wipe a work phone that gets left in the back of a ride-share. It's often the login for your other business apps as well, sometimes called single sign-on, which just means one company login opens a lot of doors. And these days there's a built-in AI assistant, with basic use typically included and heavier use costing extra.
Exactly what's included depends on the plan you pick, and the phone and laptop management piece varies the most.
This account also tends to become the master key to your business. It's often what you use to get into, or recover, many of the other systems you rely on, from your accounting software to your website. That's why we call this pillar email and identity, not just email. And because it's the master key, it needs a second lock: a second check beyond the password, like a code on your phone. We covered that in our post on password management and access control.
That's why switching email providers a few years in turns into a real project, and why it pays to choose on purpose the first time.
What not to build on: personal Gmail and internet provider email
A quick word on terms, because clarity matters here. When I say personal Gmail, I mean a free personal @gmail.com account. A Google Workspace account with your business name on it also uses Gmail, and it's a perfectly good choice.
A personal @gmail.com account is run by an individual, not by the business. Here's how that tends to play out. The quotes, invoices, and client conversations from the last two years live in a former employee's personal inbox, and the business has no clean way to get them back. Nobody did anything wrong. The account just never belonged to the business in the first place.
Internet provider email has a quieter problem. An address like yourname@yourinternetprovider.net ties part of your business identity to a vendor you might replace someday, and that address likely won’t follow you when you switch. A domain you own, like yourbusiness.com, is portable. Change internet providers or move offices, and nothing about your address changes. Switch email platforms, and there's some behind-the-scenes work to do, but your address comes with you.
Additionally, business-owned accounts are also what make a clean exit possible when someone leaves, which we covered in our post on off-boarding. [Link: Offboarding post]
Microsoft or Google: how to choose
For most small businesses, either one is a right answer. Both are mature, both are secure when they're set up properly, and both work on Mac and Windows. So the real question is which one fits how your team works. A few plain questions help:
What does your accounting or industry software work best with? If the tool your business runs on connects more deeply with one of them, that often settles it.
What does your team already know? Retraining everyone costs time and patience.
Do you need full desktop apps, or does working in a web browser cover it? This matters a lot more than Mac versus Windows. The brand of computer doesn't decide it. How your team works on it does.
In the interest of full disclosure, GranIT runs on Microsoft 365. For us it made sense, because most of the tools I use to run the business plug into it. It may make sense for you too, or Google may be the better fit. The key is picking the one whose features fit how your team works, not the one your IT provider happens to use. We fully support both.
As for cost, both companies change their pricing often enough that I won't pin down exact numbers. As a rough ballpark, entry plans run in the single digits per person per month, and fuller plans land somewhere in the teens to low twenties.
What about the other options?
Other providers exist, and some of them are very good at email. A few come close to the full package, but most trade away one or more of the extras above.
Before getting to the closest one, there's a term worth defining, because it comes up again later. A shared mailbox is one inbox that several people can read and reply from, each using their own login. Think info@ or billing@. Microsoft calls it a shared mailbox. Google has its own version of the same idea. A mailing list that sends a copy of every message to each person's own inbox is not the same thing, because everyone ends up working from their own separate copy.
Proton is the closest of the alternatives, and it's a genuinely good option for privacy-minded businesses. By that standard, though, it comes up short. It offers group addresses that deliver copies to each person, but no true shared inbox, a gap independent reviewers like Valydex and FitGap have noted too. If that changes, I'd happily put it in the running.
Buy direct, not through a reseller
If you choose Microsoft 365, there's one more decision hiding in the checkout: who you buy it from. A lot of small businesses end up getting it through GoDaddy, usually because they bought their domain there and Microsoft 365 was offered right alongside it.
GoDaddy's version is the same Microsoft product, and it can work fine day to day. The real question isn't who sends the bill. It's who controls the account.
When you buy through GoDaddy, GoDaddy sits in the middle and manages the admin controls. That means you, and whoever handles your IT, may not get access to all of Microsoft's admin settings for your own account, so some security and management options can be out of reach. GoDaddy's plans also don't include everything Microsoft offers. In fact, GoDaddy's own help page lists adding products or features not included in its plans as a reason customers move. And moving later isn't a simple switch. GoDaddy has to release the account, new licenses have to be bought, and passwords get changed along the way.
None of that is a disaster. It's just extra work you can skip by buying directly from Microsoft. If you go through an IT provider instead, make sure the business is still listed as the account owner and holds the administrator and recovery logins, not just the provider.
Setting it up right
Once you've picked a platform, three setup details make a big difference.
Own your domain. Your domain, the yourbusiness.com part, should be registered in the business's name, with the owner holding the login. Not the web designer who built your site years ago, and not an employee who has since moved on. If you're not sure who holds that login today, it's worth finding out. While you're at it, note which company does what. The company where your domain is registered, the company that hosts your website, and the company that runs your email often aren't the same, and it helps to have that written down somewhere.
Make sure your email can prove it's really you. A while back, a prospective client called me after a frustrating phone call with one of his own clients. He'd emailed him something while they were talking, and it never showed up. After some poking around, his client found it in his spam folder. Turns out his email didn't have the right email ID settings in place. So who knows how many of his other clients weren't getting all of his email.
Email ID settings are three behind-the-scenes settings that let other mail systems check whether a message claiming to be from your business actually came from you. Your IT person may call them SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Set up properly, they make it much harder for someone to send convincing fakes in your name, and they make your real mail less likely to land in spam. You don't need to know how they work. You just want someone to confirm your email ID settings are in place.
Use shared mailboxes, not shared passwords. Remember the shared mailbox from earlier? This is where it earns its keep. An info@ address with one password the whole office knows is one of the most common setups I run into, and one of the easiest to fix. Give each person their own login and access to the shared mailbox. When someone leaves, you remove their access, instead of changing the password and passing the new one around to everyone else.
One last thing. Microsoft and Google keep your data running, but that isn't the same as being able to get it back after it's been deleted. We covered that difference in our post on backups. [Link: Backup post]
Now I know what you're going to say...
"But my personal @gmail.com (or my internet provider's email) is free." It is, but you don't control it, and that's really the whole point of this post. It's also a missed marketing opportunity. Every email you send could be putting your business name in front of someone, and a real business address doesn't cost much in the grand scheme of things.
"We're tiny, and what we have works. Why change?" Fair question, and I'm not telling you to drop everything. But as you grow, your admin needs grow with you, and moving five people is a lot easier and cheaper than moving twenty-five.
"I'm already on Gmail, or on GoDaddy. Now what?" You didn't make a mistake, and moving is very doable. It just gets harder the longer the business builds on the old setup, so it's worth having a plan even if it isn't this month's project.
"I can't risk downtime during a move." Totally reasonable. Moves like this get planned and tested ahead of time, scheduled for weekends or other slow periods, and the accounts that matter most can go first. Your old email doesn't disappear during the move.
"I only need email. Why pay for a whole suite?" You might not need the top plan. What's included at each price point varies between Microsoft and Google, so it's worth comparing which one covers what your team actually uses at a price that works for you.
"The company that hosts my website gives me email for $2 a month." That kind of email usually comes with limited admin controls and no true shared mailbox. And like everything else here, it's easier to move off of while you're still small.
What comes next
Your email platform isn't the flashiest part of your technology, but it's the slab everything else sits on.
If you want a quick way to check yours, try these five questions:
Does the business own its domain?
Does every person have their own business login?
Can the business control who has access, including to shared addresses like info@?
Is your email account set up in the business's name, with the business holding admin control?
If the person who manages your email lost their phone tomorrow, could someone still get back into the account?
If you answered yes to all five, you're in good shape. If you're not sure about one or two, that's normal, and it's exactly the kind of thing we can look at together.
In the next post in this series, we'll take the next pillar of the foundation and dig in just as deep. If you'd rather see the whole picture now, I walk through the entire IT foundation in Groundwork, a free webinar I run on the third Wednesday of every month at noon Central. You can send in your questions ahead of time when you register.
Register for the next Groundwork session
Or if you'd rather talk through your own setup one on one:
