No manual, no ticket number, no portal to log into. This page is every instruction we have, in the order you’ll need them. Setting up email on a phone takes about four minutes.
Working hours are Monday to Friday. If you buy at nine on a Saturday night, the clock starts Monday — we’d rather say that than pretend otherwise.
A report by email. Your Google presence, your reviews, your site, your search position — scored, with the faults in priority order and plain English against each one. You do nothing. It arrives, you read it, you decide. If you want the faults fixed, the report tells you which product does it and takes the £9.99 off.
The same faults, with the click-by-click instructions to fix each one yourself. Written for someone who has never touched a Google dashboard. You do the work, at your own pace, and you keep the knowledge. If you get stuck, reply to the email — that is a real inbox, not a robot.
We create it, fill it in properly, pick the right categories and write the description. Two things we need from you: your business details, and the verification. Google posts a postcard or rings the business number — that bit is theirs and it can take a fortnight. Nobody can speed it up, and anyone who says they can is lying.
Your web address bought in your name, the mailbox created, and the DNS done properly — MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC, which is the difference between landing in an inbox and landing in a spam folder. You get a welcome email with your address, your password and your server name. Then follow the rest of this page. Mailbox is £4.99 a month or £49.90 a year and you can stop it whenever you like.
For a business with nothing online at all. We do the lot — the name, the mailbox, the Google profile, the basics — and hand you the keys. We’ll ring you once at the start to get what only you can tell us. After that you hear from us when it’s done.
Everything is in your name, not ours.
The domain is registered to you. The Google profile is owned by you. The mailbox is yours. If you sack us tomorrow you walk away with all of it and nothing stops working — that is the whole point, and it is why we write it down here where you can hold us to it.
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 start poking at phone settings. If webmail lets you in, the mailbox is fine and anything that goes wrong later is a setting, not a fault.
Works in any browser, on any device, anywhere. Nothing to install and nothing to configure. Bookmark it — it is your back door forever, and it is the first thing to try if your phone ever stops collecting mail.
Username is hello@yourbusiness.co.uk, in full. This is the single most common mistake and it looks exactly like a wrong password. Then paste the password from the welcome email — don’t retype it, capital O and zero are not friends.
The one we sent was generated for you and it travelled by email, so treat it as temporary. Change it in webmail settings to something you’ll remember. Do it before you set up your phone, or you’ll type the old one into the phone and have to do it twice.
Send one to your Gmail or Hotmail, then reply from there and check it comes back. Out and back is the only test that proves anything — a message that sends but never receives is a different fault from one that does neither, and knowing which saves an hour.
Write a real subject and a couple of real sentences. An empty test email gets treated as spam by every mail system on earth, including ours. We learned that one the hard way.
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 else below is the same for everybody.
Two rules that cover nine faults out of ten.
Say IMAP, never POP. IMAP keeps your mail on the server, so the same inbox appears on your phone, your laptop and webmail, and deleting on one deletes everywhere. POP downloads it onto one device and takes it off the server — lose that device and the mail is gone. Some apps still offer POP first. Say no.
Outgoing needs the password too. Apps often leave outgoing authentication switched off, or label it “optional”. It isn’t. Mail arrives fine and nothing you write ever leaves — the classic half-working mailbox, and it is always this.
About four minutes. Apple moved these settings in iOS 18, so both routes are below — use whichever one your phone has.
iOS 18 and newer: Settings → Apps → Mail → Mail Accounts.
iOS 17 and older: Settings → Mail → Accounts.
If you can’t see Apps, you’re on the older one. Then tap Add Account.
Other is at the very bottom of the list, under all the logos. This is the step people get wrong — tapping the Google or Outlook logo because that’s what their old email was. Your new mailbox is none of those. It’s 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. Tap Next.
Two blocks appear: Incoming Mail Server and Outgoing Mail Server. Put your server name in both Host Name boxes, and your full email address and password in both sets of username and password fields.
Outgoing says “Optional” next to username and password. Ignore that. Fill them in. Leave them empty and you’ll receive mail all day and never send a single message.
It sits on “Verifying” while it checks. If it asks about an unverified certificate, that usually means a typo in the server name — go back and read it letter by letter rather than tapping Continue. When it lands, make sure Mail is switched on and tap Save.
Open Mail, write to your old address with a real subject, send it, then reply from the other side. Both directions working means you’re done and you can stop reading.
Samsung, Google, OnePlus and the rest all word things slightly differently. The Gmail app is on virtually every Android phone, 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 in the top right → Add another account. Some phones route you through Settings → Add account instead. Either arrives in the same place.
Not Google, not Outlook, not Yahoo. Other. Then type your full email address and tap Next.
It may ask what kind of account this is. Personal (IMAP) every time. If your phone shows “Manual setup” instead, tap that and choose IMAP on the next screen. Then enter your password.
Username must be the full email address, not just the first part — Android often pre-fills only the bit before the @ and that will fail. Server is the name from your welcome email. Port 993, security SSL/TLS. Tap Next.
Same server name. Port 587, security STARTTLS. Make sure “Require sign-in” is ticked and the username is again the full address with the password filled in. Untick that and you have a mailbox that receives but never sends.
Give the account a label and set the name people see on your messages. Then send one to your old address and reply from there. Both ways working means you’re finished.
Using the Samsung Email app instead?
Same four settings, different wording. Add account → Other → Manual setup → IMAP account. Incoming 993 with SSL, outgoing 587 with STARTTLS, full address as the username in both. If it offers to “sign in with Google”, that is the wrong path entirely.
Same four settings again. Pick your program.
Type your address, then look for Advanced setup or Let me set up my account manually — if you let Outlook guess it will often try to sign you into Microsoft and fail. Choose IMAP. Incoming 993 SSL/TLS, outgoing 587 STARTTLS, full address as the username on both.
If Outlook loops asking for a password that you know is right, it has almost always saved a half-finished attempt. Remove the account and add it again with Advanced setup from the start — faster than fighting it.
Mail → Settings → Accounts → + → Other Mail Account. Name, address, password, Sign In. When it says it can’t verify, that is expected — it just means type the server in yourself. Server name in both boxes, IMAP, and let it finish.
Account Settings → Account Actions → Add Mail Account. Name, address, password, then Configure manually. IMAP, 993, SSL/TLS for incoming; 587, STARTTLS for outgoing; full address as username on both. Re-test, then Done.
You don’t 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 businesses we look after never install anything at all. There is no prize for a desktop client.
Five faults cover almost everything, and four of them are the same two settings. Work down the list in order.
Still stuck? Reply to your welcome email. It reaches Andy and Sarah, not a queue, and it is quicker than anything else you could do.
If yours isn’t here, reply to your welcome email and we’ll answer it — and then it goes on this page for the next person.
You can, and plenty do. Add the account to the Gmail app on your phone using the Android steps above — the Gmail app runs non-Google mailboxes perfectly well. What we’d avoid is Gmail’s “send mail as” feature on a free Gmail account: it sends through Google’s servers rather than yours, which undoes the SPF and DKIM setup you just paid for and lands 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, and put it on your van, your invoices and your Google profile. The old one quietly goes quiet on its own. We’d never recommend a hard cutover; that is how you miss a job.
Yes. A second mailbox is another £4.99 a month. But most small firms don’t need one — an alias is usually the right answer and costs nothing. An alias is a second address, like accounts@ or bookings@, that drops into the same inbox you already have. One place to look, several ways for people to reach you. Ask and we’ll add it.
Plenty for normal business use — years of ordinary mail. What fills a mailbox is attachments, usually photographs of jobs. If you ever get near the limit we can raise it rather than make you delete things. Tell us before it stops accepting mail, not after.
We can’t read your mail. We can reset your password if you’re locked out — that is the whole of our access, and it is the same access 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 won’t set a mailbox up without them.
£39.99 once, for the domain and the setup. Then £4.99 a month or £49.90 a year for the mailbox, starting the day it goes live. The yearly one is two months free. Both are taken at the checkout together, so there is no second bill you didn’t expect.
No. The mailbox is a subscription you can cancel whenever you like. The £39.99 is a one-off and there is nothing recurring hidden inside it.
No. It is registered to you, in your name, and you can move it to any registrar you like. We’ll hand over the transfer code without arguing about it and without a fee. A supplier who holds your web address hostage is telling you something about how the rest of the relationship will go.
The mailbox stops collecting new mail and eventually the contents go. So before you cancel, tell us — we’ll 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 verification is quicker but they choose which you get, not you. If a postcard hasn’t arrived in a fortnight it can be re-sent, and we’ll do that for you. Anyone offering to speed Google up is selling you something that doesn’t exist.
No, and we say it plainly because it has caused confusion before. £39.99 buys the domain and the email. The Google Business Profile is a separate £29.99 job. If you want both, that is what the bundle is for.
Andy and Sarah. Two people in Southend-on-Sea. There is no account manager, no support tier and no ticket queue — when you reply to an email, one of us reads it. That is the trade: you get straight answers from the people doing the work, and occasionally you wait until the morning.
Tell us and we’ll fix the page. Phone makers rename these menus every year and we would rather this page was right than looked tidy. That is not a customer service line, it is genuinely how this page gets better.
You’ve just read our entire support process before spending a penny. That was deliberate. Most of the trade hides it until after you’ve paid.
