Get Email on Your .ART Domain in Fifteen Minutes

Email is still the app that matters most

Of everything that has launched since the inbox, nothing has replaced it. Residencies confirm over email. Galleries send contracts over email. Collectors send invoices and wire instructions over email. If you already trust yourname.art enough to put your website there, using that same address for email is the more obvious of the two things you can do with the domain you own, not an optional upgrade.

The good news: connecting the two takes about fifteen minutes, and almost none of it requires understanding DNS. Your email provider tells you exactly what to type, and you paste it into one page of your .ART dashboard once. Here is the whole process, starting with what is actually happening behind the scenes.

Start here: the building, the shop window, and the letterbox

Think of your domain as an address on a street. annasmith.art is the address itself: the plot, the number on the door, the thing that belongs to you and that people can find.

Your website is the shop window at that address. It is what visitors see when they walk up to it.

Your email is the letterbox next to the same door. It carries the same address, and somebody has to install it.

That last part is where most artists get stuck, and it is worth saying plainly: buying the address does not automatically give you a letterbox. No registrar anywhere works differently, whether the extension is .art, .com or anything else. What you own is the address and the right to decide who empties the letterbox for you. Fitting it takes about fifteen minutes, and this guide walks through every one of them.

What is actually going on behind the scenes

Every domain has a small public notebook attached to it, called a DNS zone. The notebook holds a handful of lines, and each line answers one question about your domain:

• An A record answers “where does the website live?” It points to the server that stores your pages.

• An MX record answers “where should letters go?” MX stands for Mail eXchange. This is the letterbox line, and it is the one you are here for.

• A TXT record holds short notes that prove the domain really belongs to you. Email providers read these to confirm that a message signed with your name was genuinely sent by you.

Setting up email means writing one or two new lines into that notebook. Your email provider hands you the exact text. You copy it into your .ART dashboard. You wait a couple of hours. Letters start arriving.

That is the entire concept. Everything below is detail.

Step one: choose who runs your letterbox

There are three realistic routes, and the right one depends on how much mail you actually send.

Option A: forwarding, free

Nothing new to log into. Mail sent to hello@annasmith.art is passed straight through to the inbox you already use every day. Cloudflare Email Routing and ImprovMX both do this at no cost. The catch is worth knowing before you choose it: when you hit reply, the message leaves from your old address, so the person on the other end sees your Gmail rather than your domain. Gmail’s “Send mail as” feature fixes that, though it adds a few steps. Good for anyone handling a handful of messages a month.

Option B: a real mailbox, free

Zoho Mail offers a genuinely free plan: up to five mailboxes on one domain, 5 GB each, sending and receiving fully under your own name. The limits are honest ones. You work in Zoho’s web interface or its mobile app, because IMAP is reserved for paid tiers, which means Apple Mail and Outlook will not connect. For most individual artists this is the sweet spot.

Option C: a paid mailbox

Google Workspace starts at $7 per mailbox per month on an annual plan, or $8.40 month to month. iSetting it up follows the same shape as the others: Google first verifies you own the domain, usually with a single TXT record, then hands you the MX value to paste in below, so the paid tier is not more automatic than the free ones. Microsoft365, Fastmail and Proton Mail sit in a similar range, with Proton the usual choice for anyone who cares about encryption. You get full app support, larger storage and someone to call when things break. Worth it once email is genuinely part of how you work.

Whichever you pick, you will touch your domain’s DNS exactly once, the same three steps below, regardless of provider. That is true even for Google Workspace: there is no route that skips DNS entirely, but you are never guessing at the values. Your provider generates them, and you paste them in.

Step two: find the DNS settings on your .ART domain

If you registered through get.art, everything you need is already in your account.

1. Log in and open your domain list.

2. Click “Other settings” next to the domain you want, or the gear icon at the end of its row.

3. You land on the management page for that domain. In the left-hand menu, click “DNS Management”.

4. A second menu appears under “Actions”, listing every record type: A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, TXT, SRV, SOA. This is your notebook, with one page per type.

The management page for a single .ART domain. DNS Management sits in the left-hand menu. Registration and billing details are blurred here.

If your domain sits with another registrar, the same options exist under a name like “DNS”, “Zone editor” or “Advanced DNS”. The fields are identical.

Step three: add the MX record

Click “Manage MX Records”, then “Add A New MX Record”. You will see four fields.

The Add MX Record form. The grey note at the top is the panel telling you to use @ when the record applies to the domain itself.

Hostname/Alias: @	The panel spells this out in its own note at the top: to specify no host name, use the at character. The @ simply means “the domain itself”, so mail to anything@yourname.art is covered.
Full MX Name / Mail Server / Destination: the server address your provider gave you	Zoho uses mx.zoho.eu, mx2.zoho.eu and mx3.zoho.eu. Google uses smtp.google.com. Whatever appears in your provider’s setup screen goes here, character for character.
TTL: 7200	This is how long the internet is allowed to remember the answer before checking again. On .ART domains 7200 seconds, two hours, is the minimum and the sensible default.
Pri: 10	Priority decides the order mail servers are tried, and the lowest number goes first. If your provider lists several servers, add one record for each and give them the priorities shown, usually 10, 20 and 50.

The same form filled in for Zoho Mail: @ as the hostname, mx.zoho.eu as the destination, 7200 as the TTL, 10 as the priority.

Click “Add Record” and repeat for every server on your provider’s list. Two or three records is normal.

Step four: add the TXT records so your mail is trusted

Mail that arrives without proof of identity tends to land in spam. Three short TXT records fix that, and your provider generates all of them for you.

• SPF is the guest list. It names the servers allowed to send mail as you. Hostname @, value beginning v=spf1.

• DKIM is the signature. It adds an invisible seal to every message you send, so the receiving server can check that nothing was tampered with. Your provider gives you both the hostname (something like zmail._domainkey) and a long string of characters.

• DMARC is the instruction. It tells other mail servers what to do with anything claiming to be you that fails the first two checks. Hostname _dmarc, value beginning v=DMARC1.

  
  

Add each one under “Manage TXT Records”, using the same “Add A New TXT Record” form.

The Add TXT Record form with an SPF record entered. DKIM and DMARC go in the same place, each as its own record.

Skipping this step is the single most common reason a new address seems to work in testing and then quietly disappears into other people’s junk folders.

Step five: check it works

Give the change up to two hours, then send yourself a message from another address and reply to it. If both directions succeed and the reply shows your .ART address as the sender, you are finished.

When something does not work

• Nothing arrives after several hours

  Check that the Hostname field contains @ and not your full domain name. This is the most frequent slip.

  
  

• Mail arrives but lands in spam

  Your SPF and DKIM records are missing or mistyped. Go back to step four.

  
  

• You can receive, but replies still come from your old address

  You are on a forwarding setup. Configure “Send mail as” in your existing mail app, or move to Option B or C.

  
  

• Your website went down

  An A record was edited by mistake. A records and MX records are independent of each other, so email changes should never touch your site.

  
  

• Your domain uses a website builder

  Some builder integrations manage the DNS zone for you. If the MX fields are locked, add the records through the builder’s own domain settings instead.

It’s yours to keep

It is also yours to keep. Platform handles change hands, get renamed, and vanish when a service closes. The address stays with you for as long as you renew it, and everything attached to it moves with you.

Over 315,000 artists, galleries and institutions have already claimed their .ART address. Registration starts at $30 a year at get.art, and the letterbox is fifteen minutes away.