Basic setup for using mailgun to handle your company email addresses

• A (free) mailgun account
• Ownership of a domain and permission to edit its DNS records

We'll be using custom.com as the example domain

• In the sidebar, go to sending > domains and hit "Add new domain"
• Mailgun suggests using a subdomain - mg.custom.com
• Choose EU or US servers as appropriate for your business before submitting
• Now submit and you'll be taken to the DNS records you need to add on your DNS provider's site

• Go to your DNS provider's domain settings page
• Enter the TXT records:
• Then the MX records:
• And finally the CNAME record if you want to track opens / clicks etc.

• In the sidebar, go to receiving and hit "Add route" at top right

First we'll set up a catch-all email address. If an inbound email is received and mailgun can't match it to a route you've set up, this tells mailgun what to do with it. This is especially useful because you don't want to miss an email just because someone's mistyped an address.

• Under "Expression type" select "Catch all"
• Add your preferred forwarding address under "forwarding" (making sure to hit the tickbox)
  • This could be an external address, or an address under your own domain (e.g. [email protected]), in which case you'll need to set that route up as well (see next section)
• Under priority, set it to 999 - we want this to be the last route that's evaluated, so it's only reached if no other matches are found.
  • (You could also hit the Stop tickbox, but this should be redundant if there are no routes with a lower priority than this one)
• Now create the route and you're done with the catch-all
  • At this point, any emails sent to your domain will be dealt with by the catch-all, because that's the only route we've set up

Now we'll add a company email address and tell mailgun to forward matching messages to a personal email address. You can do this as many times as you need.

• Under "Expression type", select "Match Recipient"
• Add your preferred company address as the recipient - e.g. [email protected]
• Add your preferred forwarding address under "forwarding" (making sure to hit the tickbox)
• Your settings should now look like this:
• Tick the Stop box
  • Mailgun goes through all routes and checks whether the inbound email matches a recipient / header / catch-all. If there are multiple matches, mailgun will forward the message multiple times. So a message sent to [email protected] will be sent to [email protected] AND to the catch-all forwarding address (e.g. [email protected]). This is why I suggest ticking the Stop box
• Hit "Create Route" at the bottom and once the DNS records have finished propagating, messages sent to your company address will be forwarded to your forwarding address!

Depending on your team size / responsibilities / etc., it might be a good idea to set support@ to go to the developers, and hello@ to go to the marketing team. (Since there are only two of us in my biz, we just send everything to both of us - which is useful for us but might be annoying for others.)

You can also

• Set mailgun to store inbound messages for you to access via the API
• Set the forwarding address to a URL as well as an email address (e.g. if you use Zapier to trigger an action when you receive a support query)

(This is for gmail - you may need to check your email provider's docs, but it shouldn't be too different)

• Go to Settings > Accounts & Import
• Under "Send mail as", hit "Add another email address"
• Enter your display name and email address, and go to the next step
• The SMTP server is smtp.mailgun.org
• The port is 587, using TLS
• The login is [email protected] - i.e. postmaster@ + the subdomain you set up on mailgun
• The password is available at Mailgun - Sidebar > Domain Settings > SMTP Credentials
• Now submit this and google will send a test email to make sure you actually do have access to the address you're claiming, and then you're done!