One of the drawbacks of having a bunch of domains for side projects is that it takes a lot of effort to set up email for them.
You might want to set up an email with your custom domains if you want to send out a newsletter coming from the domain.
The two options that I’ve used are, either setting up an actual inbox with a service like Fastmail or using AWS, or more specifically SES to set up the ability to receive email on a custom domain.
Both of these options have their drawbacks.
With Fastmail, you’re paying for and managing an additional inbox.
With AWS SES, it is a lot of technical overhead and it isn’t the cleanest solution.
Simple and clean email forwarding
I recently found a service called Forward Email and it solves both of the drawbacks mentioned above.
It is simple, you don’t have to manage a separate inbox and the solution is clean.
The process for getting emails forward to a custom domain takes updating three records with your DNS—two MX records and a TXT record.
Once the DNS resolves, any emails sent to your custom domain will be forwarded to an email of choice.
So let’s say I have a custom domain at pizzafriendsunited.com and my personal email is hi@michaelsoolee.com. By using Forward Email, when folks send emails to anything @pizzafriendsunited.com, it’ll automatically forward them to hi@michaelsoolee.com.
If you wanted to, you could additionally send emails from the custom domain simply by adding an additional TXT record in your DNS.
Super handy tool for projects
Next time you come up with a new project idea and you nab a new domain, check out Forward Email. It provides a simple and clean solution for handling emails without the need for managing a separate inbox.