June 15, 2025 • 1 minute read

I don't pay for a custom email address

but I have a custom email

Table Of Contents
  1. Here is how

I have a custom email. You can find it on the bottom of this site, protected with some JS (i.e. invisible for very basic web crawlers).

This seemed important to have when I set it up. I don’t get a ton of use out of it, but it gives people a way to contact me when my blog posts circulate in some spaces.

Instead of paying some nominal sum for an email inbox, I pay $0 with email routing and aliasing.

Here is how

First, set up email forwarding. This is pretty straightforward with DNS-level support, which is pretty common. I use CloudFlare which lets me set up email forwarding rules. Any emails to [email protected] get sent to my personal address.

This might be enough for your use case, but it helps to be able to send them with the same address. For this I add a custom “account” to gmail (under the ”Accounts and Import” tab of the settings page).

On the first page it asks for the “send as” email (the one we’re routing) and the handle you want. Here’s what I might put into it:

On the next, it will ask for some more technical information. Assuming I’m routing [email protected] to my personal gmail account [email protected], the values might look like this:

That Google App Password must be created through the normal way. It’s somewhere under the “Sign-in & security” section of your google account, but there are enough guides for this already

# end note