You are searching for company email because you are tired of sending quotations from a free Gmail account that ends in @gmail.com, or because a client in Riyadh asked why your mail is not on your own domain. Perhaps a foreign provider sent you an invoice in dollars and you did not know how to settle it from a riyal or dirham account. The question is really three questions: which platform, which currency, and what you need in place before you click “buy”. We answer all three from our work with companies in the UAE and Saudi Arabia since 2003.
Quick Answer
Company email in the Gulf means a mailbox on your own domain (you@company.com) from one of three platforms: Microsoft 365 if your team works in installed Outlook, Word and Excel; Google Workspace if it works in the browser and shares files in Drive; and Zoho Mail if you want email alone without an office suite. Currency is not a barrier: our portal shows all three in Saudi riyals, dirhams and Egyptian pounds, and you pay by card. Before buying you need a domain and three DNS records (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) so your mail stays out of spam. See our business email page and the step-by-step guide how to make a company email.
Why Email on Your Company Name, Not Free Gmail
Trust starts with the address. The first thing a client reads in your email is what follows the @ sign. sales@company.com says there is a company with a domain and a website behind you; company.sales2024@gmail.com says the opposite, however good the message is. In government tenders and correspondence with large companies we see email on the domain treated as an unwritten requirement.
Ownership matters more than trust. A free account is registered in a person’s name, and the password goes with them. When the employee leaves, client correspondence, contracts and invoices leave too, and the company cannot recover them. A mailbox on the company domain belongs to the company: you reset its password from the admin console, hand it to another employee, and keep its archive. We have seen this situation repeatedly at clients, and it has been the difference between losing a deal and closing it.
Delivery to the inbox. Email on your domain lets you set the SPF, DKIM and DMARC records that prove to receiving servers the message really came from you. A free account does not give you that control, and a sales email that lands in the spam folder is an email that was never sent.
Administration and retention. All three platforms give you a central admin console: create and disable accounts, enforce password policy and two-step verification, and retain messages. These are the controls auditors and large clients ask about when they want to know how you protect their correspondence.
The Three Compared
Microsoft 365 for companies that live in Outlook. Microsoft’s three business plans are Business Basic, Business Standard and Business Premium, listed on the Microsoft 365 for business page. As our portal lists them, Business Basic gives you a 100 GB mailbox, 1 TB of OneDrive and the Office apps in the browser and on mobile; Business Standard adds the installed desktop Office apps; and Business Premium adds the device and identity layer through Intune. Companies dealing with government bodies in either country lean towards this platform because their counterparts work in Outlook too.
Google Workspace for teams that work in the browser. According to the Google Workspace plans page, Business Starter gives 30 GB of pooled storage per user, Business Standard raises that to 2 TB and Business Plus to 5 TB, and the Business plans can be bought for up to 300 users while Enterprise has no user limit. The real advantage is several people working on the same document at the same moment without emailing copies. Start-ups and marketing agencies among our clients usually choose it for that reason, and we covered the plans in detail in Google business email plans.
Zoho Mail when you want email alone. Our portal lists the Zoho Lite plan: a 5 GB mailbox on your domain with the Zia assistant, migration help and identity management. It is the right fit for a small office, clinic or restaurant that needs a professional email address and does not need Teams or Drive. If the company grows later, we move it to one of the other two platforms without losing a message.
Currency and Billing from the Gulf
You choose the currency before you see the price. The portal link itself takes a currency parameter: ?currency=7 shows prices in Saudi riyals, ?currency=2 shows them in dirhams, and ?currency=4 in Egyptian pounds; the portal also shows US dollars, euros and pounds sterling. The current price on the portal is the reference, and you will not find it in this article because it changes.
Card payment and an invoice from a UAE company. You pay by bank card in the currency you selected and receive an invoice from a company registered in the UAE, with tax as shown on the invoice. That makes life easier for the accountant in Riyadh or Jeddah: no international transfers and no surprise exchange differences between the order date and the booking date.
The price is locked for 36 months. We commit to holding the price you subscribed at for three years and to giving 30 days’ notice before any increase after that. In our experience, what worries Gulf companies most about foreign email subscriptions is the price jump at the first renewal, and this commitment is written on the portal.
The Domain First: .sa, .ae or .com
No email without a domain. The username (you@) is built on the domain and cannot be changed later without re-configuring every account, signature and printed business card. That is why we ask a client about the domain before we ask about the plan.
.ae and .sa are national extensions. Each is a country-code domain (ccTLD) with its own registry and its own conditions, and it tells your client you are a local company in that country. .com is a global extension with no geographic condition, understood by everyone and easy to dictate over the phone. For a company that sells in both countries we usually recommend .com for email, with the national extension registered and pointed at the same website so a competitor cannot take it.
Your old domain stays with you. If your domain is registered elsewhere, in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else, there is no need to transfer it: we connect it to the email service through DNS records only and ownership stays where it is. If you are starting from scratch, you register .ae, .com and others on our domain registration page in the same currency you chose for the email.
The Setup That Keeps Your Mail Out of Spam
MX records tell the world where your mailbox is. The first step after purchase is pointing the MX records in your domain’s DNS at the servers of the platform you chose. Without them no mail arrives; with them, delivery begins within the time set by the record’s TTL.
SPF defines who may send in your name. One text record lists the Microsoft, Google or Zoho servers plus any other server that sends on behalf of the domain, such as your invoicing system or website. A missing or incomplete SPF record is the cause we see most often when a new company’s mail lands in the spam folder.
DKIM signs the message digitally. The platform generates a key, publishes its public half in DNS, and the receiving server verifies that the message was not altered in transit. Enabling it is one step in the admin console, but it is frequently forgotten.
DMARC tells the receiver what to do with forgeries. It ties the two previous records to a clear policy: monitor only, quarantine, or reject. With our clients we start in monitoring mode and tighten the policy after a few weeks of reading the reports. We explained all three in SPF, DKIM and DMARC explained, and if you subscribe through us we configure them before you send your first message.
Migrating from an Old Mailbox
Do not delete the old before the new works. A migration that succeeds follows this order: inventory the mailboxes, groups and aliases; lower the DNS TTL a day before the move; create the accounts on the new platform; copy messages and folders over IMAP or with the platform’s tool; switch MX; and keep the old server running for two weeks to catch any late message.
The tools are built into the platforms. The Google Workspace plans page lists the Google Workspace Migrate tool for data migration in Business Standard, Microsoft 365 accepts migration from IMAP and from an old Exchange, and Zoho includes migration help in the plan as our portal shows. What needs experience is the ordering and timing of the steps so that no message is lost and mail does not stop in the middle of a working day.
Phones and signatures after the switch. What is most often forgotten after a migration is re-configuring mail on employees’ phones and updating signatures and shared calendar invitations. We prepare a checklist per employee and send it the day before the move. What the service covers is on our email migration page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I buy company email and pay in Saudi riyals?
Yes. The portal shows the Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Zoho plans in Saudi riyals when you open the store link with ?currency=7, and you pay by bank card in that currency. The invoice comes from our UAE company, with tax as shown on it. The price stays locked for 36 months, with 30 days’ notice before any change.
Which is better for a small company, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace?
It depends on how your team works, not on its size. A team that lives in installed Outlook, Word and Excel and corresponds with government bodies fits Microsoft 365. A team that works in the browser, edits documents together and meets on video fits Google Workspace. If you only need a professional address on your domain, Zoho Mail is enough.
Do I need a .sa or .ae domain for company email to work?
No. Any domain you own works with all three platforms, whether .com, .ae, .sa or another extension. A national extension shows you are a local company, but .com is easier to type and remember for a company selling in more than one country. A domain registered elsewhere needs no transfer; we connect it to the email through DNS records only.
How long does migrating old email to the new platform take?
It depends on the size and number of mailboxes and the speed of the old server, so we do not promise a figure before the inventory. We do commit that the MX switch happens outside working hours, that the old server keeps running for two weeks to catch late messages, and that every employee gets a setup checklist beforehand.
Sources
- Google Workspace plans and feature comparison (accessed 2026-10-18)
- Microsoft 365 for business (accessed 2026-10-18)
- Managed business email store on our portal in Saudi riyals (accessed 2026-10-18)
- Managed business email store on our portal in dirhams (accessed 2026-10-18)
Where We Are
BIGBANG ITS has planned and run technology for UAE businesses since 2003, headquartered at the Sharjah Research, Technology and Innovation Park with a branch in Business Bay, Dubai. Support runs 24/7 and the office is open Saturday to Thursday, 09:00–18:00 Gulf time. Contact us or message us on WhatsApp.
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