Email on your own domain is usually the first thing a growing business fixes. It looks professional, it keeps business correspondence under the company's control, and it makes joiners and leavers manageable.
How they compare in practice
- Microsoft 365 — the natural choice if your team lives in Outlook, Excel and Word, or if you need desktop Office applications included. Familiar to most office staff in India.
- Google Workspace — strong if your team already works in Gmail, Drive and Meet, and prefers working in the browser. Administration is straightforward.
- Zoho — competitively priced, with a broad business suite, and popular with cost-conscious Indian businesses. Worth a serious look if budget per user matters.
Differences in storage, admin controls and bundled apps do exist, and they change often enough that the current plan pages are more reliable than any article. The durable point is the one above: follow the tools your team already uses.
The part that actually causes problems
- Your domainyourcompany.com
- DNS recordsMX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC
- Mail platform365, Workspace or Zoho
- MailboxesDesktop and mobile
- MX tells the world which server accepts mail for your domain.
- SPF lists which servers are allowed to send mail as your domain.
- DKIM signs your outgoing mail so the receiver can verify it was not altered or forged.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and can send you reports.
When business mail starts landing in customers' spam folders, one of these is usually incomplete — often an SPF record that no longer covers everything sending on your behalf, such as an ERP system or a billing application.
Storage, archiving and leavers
Two practical questions decide more than the feature list. First, mailbox size: a business that keeps fifteen years of mail with attachments will outgrow an entry-level plan, and the fix is either a larger plan or an archiving policy. Second, what happens when someone leaves: every platform lets you convert a mailbox to a shared one or forward it, but this needs deciding before the person goes, not after.
Migration checklist
- List every mailbox, alias, shared mailbox and distribution list
- Check what else sends mail as your domain — ERP, website forms, invoicing tools
- Reduce DNS record TTLs a day before the switch
- Copy existing mail across and verify before changing MX records
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, then check a test message passes all three
- Configure desktop and mobile clients for each user on cut-over day
- Keep the old mailboxes reachable for a few weeks
Common mistakes
- Switching MX records before mail has finished copying
- Two SPF records on the same domain, which invalidates both
- Forgetting the application that sends invoices, so customers stop receiving them
- Nobody holding the admin account when the person who set it up leaves