Yandex FREE domain email service

As of now (April 2016 Aug 2019), there are two free domain email services available: Yandex.Mail for Domain (originally in Russian and you need to switch language if you read English) and Zoho Mail Suite, while Microsoft and Google have cancelled their free domain email plans. Yandex is a Russian website and it provides generous quota for free. So I decide to give Yandex a try and note down some steps here.

1. Sign up a Yandex account. Be aware, you are creating an account like example@yandex.com which is a personal thing like gmail, and not necessarily connected to any domain.
2. Go to Yandex Mail for Domain, log in using the Yandex personal account to add the domain. Basically we need to add and verify the domain, then set up the DNS. Attention: your personal email will be the administor account for that domain.
3. Generate some email addresses like hello@example.com.
4. Next time, go to Portal @ Yandex.Connect to manage

Some important notes about DNS settings:

• MX record: MX, @, mx.yandex.net., 10
• SPF record: TXT, @, v=spf1 redirect=_spf.yandex.net
• CNAME record: CNAME, mail, domain.mail.yandex.net.
• DKIM record: To find this record, go to the Portal @ Yandex.Connect page, then go to “Email” tab, then go to “DKIM signatures” section. You need to set up a DNS TXT record with mail._domainkey.example.com as key and v=DKIM1; k=rsa; t=s; p=... (a long text) as value.

Users should be able to log in the domain email via https://mail.yandex.com/for/example.com or http://mail.example.com/ now.

I highly recommend this service as it’s free and kind of reliable.