Business case
Why a gmail.com address is costing your business contracts
· 6 min read · Egreed Tech, Kigali
The argument for company email is rarely about features. It is about who owns your correspondence and what a buyer assumes when your quotation arrives from a free address.
Procurement reads your address before your price
In tenders and formal negotiations, a free address is read as a signal of size and permanence. It invites the question of whether the supplier will still exist next year. That is an expensive impression to fight in a document nobody will read twice.
You do not own the correspondence
When a salesperson leaves with a personal inbox, the client history leaves with them. Every quote, every agreed variation and every attachment goes out of the door, and there is no lawful way to get it back. On a company domain the mailbox belongs to the company: it is suspended, handed over, or turned into an alias.
Nobody can enforce a policy you do not control
Consumer accounts cannot be audited, locked to an inactivity policy, or reviewed after an incident. If a client asks how their personal data is handled — and increasingly they do — there is no answer that survives scrutiny.
The switching cost is smaller than it looks
Setup is a domain, four DNS records and an afternoon. The recurring cost per mailbox is smaller than a single lost job, and on EgreedMail it is billed in Rwandan francs without an international card.
Put this into practice
Company mailboxes on your own domain, encrypted storage, priced in Rwandan francs.