Somebody emails us pretty regularly asking why their new domain doesn't come with an email inbox. They point yourbusiness.com at their Cantrip site, watch the little padlock show up, and assume info@yourbusiness.com just starts working after that. It doesn't. Not on Cantrip, not anywhere a website builder is the thing you're paying for.
That's not a gap we're embarrassed about. It's the same split we told people to expect when they bought the domain in the first place: you don't buy a domain from your website builder, and you don't get email from it either. A domain is just a name you own. What that name points to, a website, an inbox, or both, is a separate decision made at a separate service, using the same domain.
Here's the actual mechanic. When you connected your domain to Cantrip, you added an A record at your registrar, pointing your domain at our servers, so a visitor typing yourbusiness.com lands on your site. Email works the same way but with a different record type: an MX record, which tells the internet which mail servers should handle anything sent to @yourbusiness.com. Unless you've set one up, that record probably doesn't exist yet, so mail to info@yourbusiness.com just bounces.
Getting real email on your domain means picking a mail provider and pointing MX records at them, the same way you pointed an A record at us. Google Workspace and Zoho Mail are the two most people end up on: both give you a real inbox at your own domain, and both walk you through adding the MX records at whatever registrar you already used for the A record. Neither one needs Cantrip's involvement to work, because it isn't our layer. If you don't need a full inbox and just want mail to info@yourbusiness.com to land in your existing personal Gmail, most registrars also sell plain forwarding, which skips the "real inbox" part and just relays messages through.
Worth checking before you pay anyone: some registrars throw in basic forwarding free with the domain itself. A one-person shop that just wants to look legitimate in a client's inbox doesn't need the same setup as a team of five drowning in incoming mail. Match the tool to the actual volume, not to whatever the sales page upsells you into.
The honest annoyance is that this means one more account, one more login, one more line on a bill somewhere if you go the full-inbox route. We're not going to pretend that's nothing. But it's also not something a website builder should own: a company that builds your site and hosts your email and holds your domain is a company you can't easily leave. Keeping those three things at three different services is what keeps the exit door open, on all three.