I was grandfathered into Outlook.com's free custom domain email. I know gmail used to provide this also but looks like it is now part of their gmail for business.

Are there any decent free options out there? What are others using for their website customer's domain email?

Not quite sure I understand what you are asking. Most domains (all perhaps) include a certain number of mail addresses for the domain owners, so if the customers want to use that, it will be up to them.

If you are asking about from where to send bulk mail to our customers' customers, we usually recommend Mail-Chimp.

Hope this was an answer...

Sorry I didn't explain myself very well. I am creating websites for small businesses and hosting them through my s-drive account. Since coffeecup doesn't do the email hosting, I need to find somewhere else. For example my customer's website http://bachome.net would like to have email setup as bruce@bachome.net. It used to be that you could setup these custom domains for free through outlook.com or gmail but those doors are now closed.

I found Zoho will do it for free with users limited to 5GB each. Just looking for what other web designers are doing.

Unless I am misunderstanding also,, you would need to open a hosting account with one of the thousands out there, and have them host your domain bachome.net they usually provide for a number of free e-mail accounts which you can then set up so bruce@bachome.net would be easy,, you could then set up Gmail or outlook (maybe others) to bring in any e-mails from your hosting provider through "imap" which means that the e-mails sent to bruce@bcachome.net e-mails will appear in Gmail or Outlook, without your client needing to log into the e-mail account. Gmail/Outlook can also be configured to make it appear that any e-mails your client sends look like they have come from bruce@bachome.net not Gmail/Outlook.

Not sure exactly what you mean about Gmail/Outlook doors closed,,, I do it all the time for my clients,,, only the other day did it again,, but you have to have a hosting account that has e-mail accounts facility, the hosting I use allows me to have unlimited e-mail accounts for any or all of the sites that are hosted there,, unlimited usage/storage (thats a paid service) they also do a free version,

The site is being hosted by coffeecup. I have used other hosts so I understand what you are talking about with the ability to setup multiple email accounts for free through the host.

My personal website is hosted through coffeecup and several years ago I went to outlook.com and was able to setup my custom domain email for free. Gmail used to do this as well.

Since coffeecup doesn't host email, I either need to choose another host or find somewhere to host email separately.

I understand what you're saying. To accomplish what you want to do, you will need to have a hosting account with some company out there that allows you to put multiple domains in the same account. For example, perhaps GoDaddy CPanel Linux hosting.

For each client who needs email, you add their domain to that hosting account as an add-on domain and then set up all their email boxes. Once it is set up, you need to go into the DNS editing with the domain registrar and change the MX record (which is where the email is sent) to point to the server where emails are set up. The A Record in the DNS settings stays the same, pointing to Cofeecup's server where you have the website set up.

Doing this will route email to your email box while people viewing their website will be going to the Coffeecup server.

Thanks Brian. I will looks at the GoDaddy plans as well. I do have experience with CPanel setup and MX records.

I am going to give Zoho a try and will try to reply back here with results. They have free 5G mailboxes for up to 25 users per domain. They are have a lot of business tools (CRM, finance, HR, etc.) that some of my customers might be interested in paying for.