Mailbox in your own domain – Yandex Mail

If it doesn’t matter to us, who is reading our emails ( 🙂 ), then we can use a mail service provided by Yandex – a Google-like company from Russia. In Yandex.Connect we can create mailboxes in our own domain, and use them with Yandex mail servers. With free account, we can make up to 1000 mailboxes, which should be enough for home use or even for small business.

To create mailbox in our own domain, at first we need to create free Yandex account –

Next, as signed in Yandex user, we go to connect.yandex.com and in top right corner we click Try Out.

A new window pops up, where we can set our company/business name.

In the next window we can choose our subscription or invite friends. Let’s click that we’ll check this later – those settings can be changed in preferences menu.

Now we can go to our domain configuration. Click yellow ‘hamburger menu’ in the top left corner of webpage to open applications menu and then click on Admin Tools.

After that, select Domains below Organization Profile in left side menu

We’ll be redirected to ‘Webmaster’ window, where we can configure connection with our (already bought) domain. Click on Add Domain button, to pair our domain with our account. A new window pops up where we can type our domain address.

After typing our domain address, we have to confirm that we’re the owner of this domain. In the next window we can choose how we want to confirm our ownership. The first method is to set a value of TXT record on our DNS server. It’s in my opinion the simpliest method, because it doesn’t require anything more than access to our domain’s DNS server.

A procedure of adding a TXT record might be different for every domain provider. In case of OVH, in domain configuration we choose DNS Zone menu and then on the top right corner we can click button to add our TXT record.

TXT record in domeny.tv

After setting the correct data, click Check to verify our ownership. Remember, that time of updating changes in DNS servers can vary up to 72hrs for some providers and clicking the Check button right after making changes in DNS might end with error DNS record not found.

Other verification methods are: placing a tag in our homepage, placing a html file with tag or WHOIS verification, but first two require hosting attached to our domain and third one requires changes in domain setup and showing our email public.

After successful verification, we have to redirect our MX records to Yandex servers – to set this, we need to go to our domain provider’s website and in menu, where we previously changed our TXT records and now we have to add MX records with 10 prority, pointing to website  mx.yandex.net.
Don’t forget to add a dot at the end of address! The redirection won’t work without it!

example of redirected MX records on OVH
redirected MX records on domeny.tv

Reloading MX setup on DNS server might also take up to several hours. During this time we’ll be able to send messages but we won’t receive any reply, because when receiver will try to answer, he’ll get an alert about receiver address error.

Yandex can offer us redirection of our nameservers to their servers and manage our DNS from Connect but i personally don’t recommend it – while using this solution i’ve noticed problems with subdomain configuration and i’ve reverted my config back to OVH nameservers.

After setup of our MX, we go back to our Admin Tools in Yandex Connect and click button Все сотрудники . Here we can add and remove users by clicking ADD button on the bottom of the list.

EULA

For first login we need to use webmail – mail.yandex.com, because we need to accept EULA, the next ones can be performed by our email client.

Thunderbird will set up automatically to use yandex, but in other clients it might be necessary to set the configuration manually:

Service: Outgoing mail – SMTP
Server: smtp.yandex.com
Port: 465
User: (full e-mail address)
Encryption: SSL/TLS
Authentication method: password

Service: Incoming mail IMAP
Server: imap.yandex.com
Port: 993
User: (full e-mail address)
Encryption: SSL/TLS
Authentication method: password

Now we can start mailing everyone from mailbox in our own domain.

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