Business email for an Indian startup: the first-week checklist

You have a domain, a company name and at least two people. This is the order to set up email so you do not redo it in six months. Every item is something we have watched a startup skip and regret. It works whichever provider you choose; where XgenPlus does something specific we say so.

Day 1: the domain and the records

1. Own the domain in the company's name, in a registrar account that two founders can access. Domains registered on one founder's personal account with a personal card are the most common lock-out story we hear.
2. Point MX to your email provider. One provider, one set of MX records. Do not leave the registrar's parked mail service active alongside.
3. Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC before anyone sends a mail. SPF names the servers allowed to send for your domain, DKIM signs each message, DMARC tells Gmail and Outlook what to do when a message fails both. Start DMARC at p=none with a reporting address, move to p=quarantine after a month of clean reports. On XgenPlus the three records are generated for your domain in the dashboard and checked automatically.
4. Add the autodiscover CNAME so phones and Outlook find the server settings without anyone typing hosts and ports.

Day 2: the addresses

1. One mailbox per person, firstname@ or firstname.lastname@, decided once. Changing the pattern later means changing business cards, signatures and every CRM record.
2. Department addresses that are not mailboxes. founders@, hello@, support@, billing@, careers@, security@ and legal@ should deliver to the right people without a separate paid mailbox each. Add them on day two so customers and job applicants never write to a founder's personal address.
3. A noreply@ or alerts@ mailbox for the product, if you have a product that sends mail. It gets its own credentials and its own password policy, and it is the only mailbox your code ever holds a password for.
4. Two-step login on every mailbox, founders first. A stolen founder password is a stolen company.

Day 3: devices

Set up mail on each person's phone and laptop using IMAP or ActiveSync, not by forwarding to Gmail. Forwarding to personal Gmail is how company mail ends up outside the company when someone leaves, and it breaks DMARC for replies. If your provider's free plan does not include IMAP (Zoho's free plan does not), decide now whether that is acceptable, because it will not be by the tenth hire.

Day 4: the product

Decide how the app sends mail. For sign-up confirmations, password resets, receipts and alerts at startup volumes, authenticated SMTP from your noreply@ mailbox, or your provider's API, is enough and keeps SPF and DKIM aligned because the mail comes from the same domain and the same signing key as the team's mail. On XgenPlus that is SMTP over TLS or the SOAP sendMAIL method. For marketing campaigns, or OTP volumes in the tens of thousands an hour, use a dedicated sending platform on a subdomain such as mail.yourdomain.in, with its own SPF and DKIM, so a campaign complaint never touches the reputation of the domain your founders send from.

Day 5: money and paper

1. Pay yearly and get a GST invoice in the company's name. Foreign providers often invoice without GST and without your GSTIN; your accountant will ask. Indian providers, XgenPlus included, invoice in rupees with GST.
2. Put the renewal date in the shared calendar with a reminder 30 days out. Mail stopping on renewal day because a card expired is a real and recurring startup outage.
3. Write down who the admin is and give a second founder admin access. The admin console is where you add the eleventh person and reset the tenth person's password.

Week two, when you have a minute

Shared calendar for the team, a signature template with the company's registered name and address, an archive or retention setting if you sell to regulated customers, and a quarterly export of contacts. None of it is urgent; all of it is easier now than at fifty people.

If you would rather have someone do the first week with you, that is what the XgenPlus Startup Desk is for: one named person sets up the domain, the records, the addresses and the app sending, then stays on your account.