Understanding Email Solutions

This would be an email you would use for either forwarding or as a full mailbox. The biggest difference between the two options are the ability to SEND from your domain address and cost.

You could receive email at FIRSTNAME@YOURDOMAINHERE.COM and that could get automatically forwarded to MYEMAIL@GMAIL.COM (it doesn't have to be GMail but it is by far the most reliable and easiest to use.) If you reply to messages received, the reply would come from that GMAIL.COM address that the original email was forwarded to. This is something many of our authors use so that they have a vanity email on their domain and only have one email account to check. AuthorBytes can provision and provide forwarding for $34.95/yr.

With a full mailbox, you can send and receive from your address like FIRSTNAME@YOURDOMAINHERE.COM. This is something that you would host through a company like Google Workplace or Microsoft 365. Each are a paid service. We typically recommend Google Workplace and it has a low cost of $6/mailbox/month (billed by Google) and is the easiest and most user friendly. AuthorBytes charges a one time setup fee of $135 for account setup assistance. We typically schedule a Zoom meeting for this and work with you one on one to establish your account, perform domain validation, and configure the necessary DNS settings. If you are technically savvy, you also have the option of setting up the account on your own and providing us with the necessary DNS information which we will update in our servers at no cost to you.

These would be bulk emails you would send through an email service provider such as MailChimp, MailerLite, etc. These services are designed to send out bulk emails on your behalf and have drag and drop tools to help you create your email campaign. They also provide reporting services so you can see who opened the messages and who clicked links that may be contained in the message. Typically these providers recommend using your own domain for sending and to increase deliverability rates, we can setup authenticated email by copying and pasting some code into your DNS records which we host. We typically recommend MailChimp as we believe they have the best deliverability rate and is the easiest for our clients to use. In addition they also have an agency program called MailChimp & Co. that allows AuthorBytes to request access to help manage your account and this will allow us to generate API keys for WordPress integration and setup DKIM authentication for the best possible email deliverability. There is a one time setup fee of $75 to configure authenticated email for your account.