Getting a domain name for your business and setting up mailbox is one of the very first things we do to start an online business. Most of the time when we use cPanel from hosting vendors like hostgator, bluehost or any of the re-sellers, this mailbox comes for free with cPanel. But, when we don’t have any hosting purchased or configured with a domain name, then we need to add external mailbox to the domain name.

External mailbox attached to the domain name can process all your email accounts for users and can handle them effectively. Some of the most famous external mailbox include Google Apps Mailbox or Microsoft Mailbox for domain. Although, the above mentioned mailbox are most popular because of their features, over the time, they have now become paid. At present, we are left with options to either configure mailbox with hosting provider or configure it with external mailbox provider like Yandex.Mail, which is still free.

Recently, I did some research and found that we can configure Mailbox on an external domain name for free with Yandex.Mail for Domains.

If you know how mailbox and domain name works, then you can kickstart the set up process from here: https://domain.yandex.com/ Also, you need to have default Yandex account.

Incase, you are new to all these, then you need to know, how your domain DNS system can be configured and then you will be done with the following guide.

In this example setup, I am going to configure example.com with Yandex.Mail and will add mailbox for admin@example.com.

This setup is divided in following parts:

1. example.com domain setup with Yandex.Mail
2. DNS record updates at example.com domain
3. Mailbox setup of admin@example.com at Yandex.Mail admin dashboard

Here is the detailed guide on setting up domain name with Yandex.Mail:

1. First, register and create an admin account with Yandex from here.

2. After this add domain name to the Yandex.Mail from here. In our case, we will add example.com

3. Now you need to verify the domain ownership of the domain, you can do this either of the 3 methods- from uploading a file on server of the root domain or by adding CNAME or by adding given format of email into your domain name detail. In our case, we will add CNAME, because we have have not attached any hosting to the domain name.

CNAME can be added for the root domain name easily. This setting is available at DNS control panel for your root domain name. You can update the required CNAME for root domain, and after saving settings, click “Verify Domain Ownership” button. It may be possible that the DNS change will take time to propagate and verification of the domain name will be delayed.

To update DNS setting of root domain follow the guide for: Godaddy, NameCheap.

4. Once this setup completes, you must add MX records with following values:

Subdomain name — @
Type of record — MX
Data — mx.yandex.ru.
Priority — 10

These MX records are also updated from root domain DNS control panel. After this step successfully completes, you will get an option to create mailbox for an account with @example.com

5. Create Mailbox account for admin@example.com

Add username as “admin” followed by the password.

After this step is done, you can access the admin@example.com mailbox from https://mail.yandex.com/

Hope this blog post will help you in getting a mailbox for free; and this mailbox verification is required from Mandrill SMTP too. Once you have completed the domain verification at Mandrill outgoing sending domains, you would be able to send emails from Mandrill server.