Update: Related posts: (1) Setting up a new email address in Google Apps and (2) Setting up an email group (or forwarder) in Google Apps.
Note: I’m using GoDaddy in the example below because they give you full control of the DNS features of your domain. If you don’t have your domain there, you can learn how to transfer your domain to GoDaddy here.
Using Google Apps, you can now set up your MX records to use you@yourdomain.com directly in Gmail. This isn’t using POP to get your mail but telling mail that goes to your domain to basically use Google’s servers as your personal mail servers. Please note, this is NOT a regular Gmail account, but an email account (a domain even) that’s using Google Apps.
Here’s a good link to help you set up your own email program with you@yourdomain.com using Google Apps.
Update: Video/screencast below giving you a step-by-step how-to for setting up your domain to use Google Apps.
Webmail
You can use Google’s slick interface to get your mail. It’s always going to be here:
https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainhere.com
But you can also customize it so you get your mail from a friendlier URL: http://mail.yourdomain.com
Then login with your email and pass (you@yourdomain.com and your pass).
If you’d like to get your email in your email program (e.g. Outlook, Mac Mail, etc.), here are some screenshots to help you set the configuration.
More reasons to switch
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How to Set it Up
If terms such as “MX Records” and “IMAP” or “POP” scare you away, you don’t need to read any further. I’m going to explain the process here … mostly for myself so I don’t forget the zillion steps!
DNS Records
To put it simply, what we’re doing here is, at the domain level, telling email to use one server/host and the website another server/host (see Google help on MX records). We split that up at the domain registrar (e.g. GoDaddy). Another beautiful little tool that Google provides is an automated program that will change all of your MX records within your GoDaddy account (you’ll need to log in) to what they should be. Voila, done.
OK, OK, not quite. You still need to go into GoDaddy into their Total DNS Control Panel and change the “A” record so that the domain points to where your website is hosted. You’ll need to know the IP address of your site. Put it in, wait an hour, your site is back up and running.
Once your Google Apps account is set up, you’ll need to set up email addresses. Once you do that, if there’s a bunch of mail on your old server, you can set it up to POP it in the Settings –> Accounts. Since you probably already changed the DNS info on your domain, you’ll have to use the IP address for the incoming POP mail server. Works like a charm.
Another nice feature is the ability to set a CNAME record in your registrar so that you can get this new webmail at http://mail.yourdomain.com. If you choose not to or don’t care, you can still get your mail at https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainhere.com.
Here’s a small screenshot from GoDaddy. For this shot, I’m in Domain Manager and then click Launch at the DNS Manager. See Launch in blue (link).
Below is a larger screenshot for the CNAME settings. This is once you’re in the DNS manager and have the A record, CNAME records, TXT records and MX records. You can change them, add, delete, all in this one screen.
Sent Mail
Google only does “labels” and I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get the Sent Mail from the old server into Google’s Sent Mail “folder.” Sure, I could put it all in the inbox on the old server, then POP it while setting a label for that mail to be “Sent” but that’s just more incoming mail labeled as Sent. Not bad, but not ideal. If you only have a handful of sent mail on your old server, I wouldn’t bother with these steps, but I’m moving a client’s mail now and she had 1,000+ sent emails.
IMAP
I first set up an IMAP account for the email in my Outlook. This took a bit of tweaking as I can’t use just mail.yourdomain.com for the incoming server, but rather the IP address (e.g. 66.7.206.999 (not a real one)). Then I synced the folders and got the sent mail into my new Outlook IMAP account (separate from my other email — I first tried Thunderbird (where I have no email of mine) but I couldn’t get this next step to work.
Google Email Uploader
Then Google provides the Google Email Uploader. Install the little program, sign in with your Google Apps email account and then choose which folders you want to sync. I just chose the Sent Mail folder from my client’s mail. It’s busy now, says it’ll take an hour or two, but it’s working! Aha, I see it does actually just give it a label “Inbox/Sent.” Oh well, at least it’s going in there.
Related posts:
B:
I changed the Total DNS Control Panel at GoDaddy to point my domain points to gmail.com but still can’t get email on Microsoft Entourage for me or Ellen.
I get an error message that says: Unable to establish a secure connection to pop.server.net because the root certificate is not installed.
Thx,
G
Bradley: Thanks for taking me through my Entourage settings screen by screen. We found the error and it all works great now! My SPAM has been reduced to a mere trickle from a torrent before!
Cheers,
Gil
So, I’m having a bit of an issue with email. I love the new online gmail interface – but what is happening is that when I’m on my iPhone and hit refresh, I’ll get messages delivered (which is great) but some of them won’t download from the server – so I can see the subject of the email, but not the message, when I click on it (it says “not downloaded”). But, not an issue, since I thought I would just read the message when I got to my Outlook, or checked on gmail.
The issue is that those messages do not show up in either in-box, and are now solely on my phone, and I can’t get to them. Same with any messages I get online (when I was traveling in LA – and didn’t have my laptop/Outlook handy) – as soon as I viewed them online, the next time I was at my home computer, they would not download into my outlook – which is where I have all my folders organized.
So, wondering how the puzzle can be solved. As I’m afraid that allowing full downloading into each inbox (phone, gmail, Outlook) might cause the same issue as before, where thousands of messages were trying to get through each spot . . .
It was set up to move mail from your Inbox (to All Mail) when access by a POP server (an email grab from your iPhone or Outlook etc.). So I’ve set it to leave the email in the inbox no matter which device checks it so that it will be there for the next device to get, too. Let me know how that works.
Just found out (the hard way … ) that I need to change the MX records at the host (in cPanel) so that mail, for example, from the site (e.g. form mail, mail from a contact form) doesn’t think it’s a “local” address but routes to the new (technically, Gmail) address.
We have one another website named http://www.dhaddadiamonds.com
it has about 40 email accounts which were set up in outlook e.g. mr.a@dhaddadiamonds.com Now we are transfering this domain from its current domain registrar and webspace provider. So how can we do all this transfer sucessfully by set up this domain’s email with gmail free edition ? secondly all current email should not loss and need not to change. please help. We are not a techno savvy person.
How do I get my password for purposes of having mail forwarded from this account to my Microsoft outlook? The password I use to access my mail does not work. It is apparently a password set by Google.
Is it possible to upload emails from Microsoft Entourage to Gmail? I see the Google Email Uploader for Outlook, but I’m not clear on how to make this happen for Entourage. Thanks for any pointers on this!
A Jones: I don’t see it either. I would be it’s just Outlook as that’s the most popular program out there. A longshot would be to, well, somehow, export from Entourage to Outlook and then to Gmail … but of course, you’d need Outlook etc.
Virginia Sampson: Hmm, that same password should also let you into the “webmail” or e.g. http://mail.yourdomain.com and in there, you can set up forwarders. If it’s not working, talk to whoever set it up (an administrator for the domain maybe?) and they should be able to help you out.
nawal kumar: I realize I haven’t responded to this request and you’re probably all taken care of, but in a nutshell: you need to set up all of the accounts at Gmail/Google Apps and then “POP” all of the old mail from the old domain. Then do the domain DNS switch.
It is quite technical and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t understand domains, hosting, DNS, POP, and that sort of thing. I hope that helps you — or anyone rolling up their sleeves to get this done.
Great information.
I was missing this one. I have a domain in a server that is marked as spammer, because some spammers used my email address to send mails. It seem it’s easy to send mails with your address in the header, and it’s very easy to be marked as spammer.
I’m going to try this (after my golf vacations) to fix this problem as Google has top notch spam technology. Maybe it works.
Congratulations for the blog.
I want to establish emails utilizing my domain name for other people in my organization. What’s the trick?
david akers: First trick is to get into your domain registrar and set it up so Google is set up for the MX records. It can get pretty tricky, pun intended, if you’re not used to DNS, A records, MX records, and the like. Hopefully the steps above are of some help.
Best,
Bradley
Great help thanks welsh bikers
Hi,
pls guide me how i can receiving all users mail in exchange server first after then distribute all mails in users .How it is possible pls help me.
thank you
wow! that all sounded so easy and too good to be true. unfortunately, it worked for only about 12 hours, then started giving loads of trouble. First, i got suddenly logged out and unable to log in again or use the POP through Outlook. It let me back in again after 30 min., but then when i sent any email out, i got an error message telling me that i was being blocked by Gmail’s spam filters (plain vanilla email, no attachments, 2 on the cc: list, nothing spam-like at all). Shortly after that, I was blocked from even trying to send outgoing mail by an error message that i had exceeded the daily sending limit, even though my sent box only had 20 emails in it. Now we’re going through cycles where every hour or so it stops recognizing my password again for a few minutes…..how is that possible? Is this all a scam to get me to upgrade to premiere? or is Google Apps Gmail really this bad?
@Izzie Nutz: Did you ever have any luck getting it set up? With errors and troubles like you were having, I resort to my tea solutions. Post back if you figured something out.
Thank you for the “How TO” video! It helped a bunch!
Looks like everything is working fine now. Some benefits I really like now ….
– ‘Sent’ emails from my computer come into my sent box on my phone.
– I can now (through the all mail box), search for emails on the server too, from my phone. THis has been great already for when I want to do stuff on the phone rather than coming back to computer …
But curious — emails sent from phone don’t make it to the sent folder on my computer. Do you know why that doesn’t work in both ways???
And, email deleted from my phone seem to not then make it to my computer …… (my MO is to check email on my phone first thing in the morning & clear out emails that I’m not interested in referring back to from the phone — might just want to look at on computer.
Thoughts??
Hi Jan,
We set you up with POP and not IMAP. IMAP really syncs things whereas POP just sort of pulls things down from the server. Your iPhone is partly IMAP already (sending mail), but we should set up your Mac Mail to use an IMAP account also.
Let’s get you set up with IMAP.
I want to set up google mail on another website but I do not want to migrate all the emails at once. I want a few to try it out while the rest continue to go to the old mail server. How do I do this?
Thanks!
I want to set up google mail on another website but I do not want to migrate all the emails at once. I want a few to try it out while the rest continue to go to the old mail server. How do I do this?
Thanks!
Thanks for your guide!
The joke is that the , lockout problem just eventually goes away. Their program must have some sort of learning function and after pulling enough hair out, it eventually leaves you alone. For me this took about six weeks
i have no idea where i’ve gone wrong. . .i changed the mx for my cpanel (using supergreenhosting) for the relevant domain name, but the mail is not coming though???? why???
PLEASE help, its urgent
You can get some free tutorials about that on http://www.mansheb .com
If anyone is experiencing problems feel free to shoot me an email and I’d be happy to help.
I’m a former IT Manager, US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness/Response Team)member, and I speak Geek fluently. Fortunately for you I can also translate quite well.
Walking through screens, sorting through directions and emails can be tricky – but is now a thing of the past. (I.E. seen the new GeekSquad commercials? “We’ll take over your computer and your problems!”) I’ve been involved in remote support with big business clients and individuals years before Best Buy started it.
I want to add a feedback form on my website, Is it possible to use google apps for above mentioned purpose, if yes then how?
Hi. I have an OKAY G. Apps intalled for my costumer site.
But I cant make the Feedback Form on the site works correctly to send email for his account.
Anyone knows the solution?
Syed and TheRaven I haven’t even touched the Feedback Forms for Google Apps so I can’t help you there. I think a colleague of mine did it through Google Spreadsheets somehow …
hi, google apps for my site was working fine till last week, but i am suddenly getting a new page instead of the required one saying index of.. dont know wat to do…
Thank you for the insightful video tutorial – the mail client account settings screenshots are super-useful as well.
Bradley,
I’m not sure if you can help me, but I’m having trouble setting up my boss’s google video account. His gmail account is different from mine, but I’m trying to figure this out without frustrating him with emails. The problem is that when I try to login in the video uploader, it says the username/password is incorrect, and I know it is not. Is there any way you could help me? Thanks so much!
Hi Paige,
I think you’ll be best off if you log in under his account because it sounds like you’re logging in under your account. Correct?
Hope that helps a bit.
Hi Bradley,
I have a client who needs to setup google apps on his domain. Due to the urgency of this project, I don’t want to play around since it is my first Google Apps Project. Would you do this for a fee? Please email me asap.
We ve setup our emails with google apps which is runnin perfactly fine. The issue is, when we try to use Outlook 2K3/ 2K7 throug CCProxy is is not able to conect. Though it (Outlook) runs perfactly alright in all other environment. Please let me know if here is some specifc setting to be done in CCProxy for running POP Clients.
Hi Jayesh,
I haven’t heard of CCProxy, but maybe these settings can help figure out the solution: POP, IMAP. Hope that helps a bit. Please post back here if you figure out a solution.
Robert,
I pinged you offline, but haven’t heard back. Let me know if you need some help.
We ve setup our emails with google apps which is runnin perfactly fine. The issue is, when we try to use Outlook 2K3/ 2K7 throug CCProxy is is not able to conect. Though it (Outlook) runs perfactly alright in all other environment. Please let me know if here is some specifc setting to be done in CCProxy for running POP Clients.
Look at this:
http://www.youngzsoft.net/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26
Hi,
Few weeks back I have integrated our mail services with google apps. A few days back I have noticed that users submitting contact and enquiry forms in our website is not receiving to our mail. Kindly help anybody with this regard.
Thanks
Hi Rijas,
In the MX records at your host for the domain, you need to set them to this:
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
Otherwise, your “local” forms (on your site) will first look to the mail records on your site and send it there. It’s a bit like the form is trying to send mail from Apartment 14 to Apartment 107, but it’s in the same building, so it just uses the internal mail system and it doesn’t even realize that your mail is handled externally. Hope that makes sense! But add that MX record (as the main and only MX record for the domain) and you should be in good shape.
Hi there,
Found your article very useful and I’ve been trying to verify my site to google but no luck. I’m using Wix web hosting service which is a Flash base so I went with DNS config option. My domain name is hosted at Networksolutions and I’ve added TXT record already but it still couldn’t verify my site.
Any suggestions? Thanks!
the tip is nice but unfortunately, its not working for my domain
http://www.vaseemansari.com
it sent me to payment page and i dont know if u can help me to use this service as free.
need ur suggestions to be mailed to my email id
thanks
http://www.vaseemansari.com/blog/
Anyone have any idea about the differences between using gafyd (that’d be google apps for your domain) versus straight gmail. It seems that my email interface with gafyd has some limitations that are not present in gmail. For example, in gafyd, you can’t drag and drop attachments into an email…and in gafyd, the chat feature doesn’t seem to work uinless you invite people…but even then, it’s problematic. And yes, I do have the gafyd settings wide open for users to be able to chat with “outsiders”. Thanks in advance for any resposne, folks,
¯`°²¤Flash¤²°´¯
Durham, NC (usa)
Nimy, There’s usually an “upload this HTML file to your domain” option. Have you tried that one? Just a little file Google Apps provides instead of doing the whole CNAME thing.
Vaseem Are you using Google Apps Standard or Premiere? Standard doesn’t have as many options, but it’s free.
Flash, Google Apps seems to lag behind Gmail in new features, but they eventually come around. I found the “official” Google response here about the differences between Gmail and Google Apps Mail. Hope that helps!
Great how to. This is probably the most straight forward write up I’ve seen for hosting your email on Google Apps which is the best way to go about hosting Mail. No one wants to host mail, it’s such a royal pain.
Thanks for taking the time to write it up!
Thanks, Joshua. I should do an update of the post soon, I was thinking of doing a whole series on getting it all set up–and then syncing it all up with your iPhone, Outlook, calendar, and contacts. Whew. Thanks again for commenting. It’s my most popular post on the site.
thanks for making an article about google apps, this article is very useful to me. I am a web designer from Indonesia, and a lot of my customers who want to make email based on google apps. and after I read this article, I so understand how to setup google apps on a domain they want, thank you.
You’re welcome, Agus. I really like having the website and email on different servers. If one goes down, it doesn’t mean they’re both down.
I still hase difficulty downloading email from google app email to my Windows Live Mail. How to setup so that I can download my emails to Windows Live Mail?
Hi Hashim,
Here’s some help for getting Google Apps Mail to work with various email clients. I see Windows Mail, is that the same as Windows Live Mail? I don’t know as I don’t use it.
I hate my LIVE account. Its so not compatible with other apps :( except Microsoft software offcourse..
Very interesting. I am a fan of gmail and google apps, even just added a third alias (domain), fully verified, but now that i want to add an address to go with the new domain — the email address can’t be verified because it’s new and can’t receive mail … until it’s verified!
Google’s forum has plenty of users asking: “How can I verify a new email address that has not been set up yet?” — including me — and no response, some going back years!
Any ideas of solving this chicken and egg dilemma?
Thanks!
Hey Warner,
You know, I’m not very familiar with the “alias” issue–or exactly why or when you use it. This sounds like a long workaround, but would it make sense to make the MX records of the new email address (domain) point somewhere else (mail.thenewdomain.com) just to get that verification email and then switch it back to Google Apps?
Just guessing, but hope that’s helpful.
I currently redirect all our emails to our central gmail account. This is much beter solution! Going to try this soon!
Likoma is enlightening me step by step!
Once again thanks!
Great content.Thanks.
Thanks for help. I was searching this settings.
I set up my email addresses to all go to google with my domain but now I cannot send email with outlook 2010 choosing one of my other email addresses. How can I set the other emails?
Thank you
Hi Andrea,
It sounds like your other email addresses is trying to use the same outgoing server as the GA servers–and that won’t work. You’ll need to make sure your SMTP servers for the other email addresses match up with those addresses. For example:
SMTP for GA email: smtp.gmail.com
SMTP for other: mail.otherdomain.com
I hope that helps.
i have an email account under a domain and the email is created on google. I can also check the email using mail.google.com/a/mydomain.com. however, i couldnt set this email on out look using pop3.
how i did…
my name
myname@mydomain.com
pop3
mail.mydomain.com
mail.mydomain.com
myname@mydomain.com
password.
checked my outgoing sever (smtp)….
checked use same setting as my incoming…
incoming server pop (110)
checked this server requires……
outgoing server 26
use the following type……. (none)
Its not working. Please help me..
Waheed
Hi Afrah,
Please see the POP and SMTP settings above (e.g. pop.gmail.com and smtp.gmail.com).
Great info. I knew that it was possible to enable the email via Google. I just needed a good video tutorial for it. Reading tutorials is so 2005, its boring :(
Thanks Bradley and congrats on your blog. Interesting posts. Keep on posting nice stuff like this one, video tutorials =D
Thanks. This is one of the most popular posts on this site–I’m happy to help. I have more videos coming along, ideally in smaller bits as collections. More to come!
Excellent video tutorial, was able to reproduce! Thanks for the info.
I’m using & register domain web with GoDaddy.com. Can i subscribe an email address xxx@mydomain.com with Google.com apps…? Can u guide me on this matter.
Hi Syam,
It’s actually all laid out in the video above. However, I’m working on more (shorter) videos to get the whole process set up–because there are *several* steps.
But in a word, yes, you can do it with your domain at GoDaddy and using Google Apps.
Hello Bradley, great post and it helps so much! there is a feature you’ve mentioned twice in your article but you’ve not elaborated on how to perform the feature. i’ll add your quote below:
“Another nice feature is the ability to set a CNAME record in your registrar so that you can get this new webmail at http://mail.yourdomain.com. If you choose not to or don’t care, you can still get your mail at https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainhere.com.”
i need to change this so that people can go to the mail.yourdomain.com rather than the long one and i just don’t know how to do it. you mentioned that i can “set a CNAME record in your registrar..” but would you please be so kind as to elaborate a little on this. i’m also on godaddy. thank you so much. you’re doing good work sir and i’m one of the many who are very grateful.
Hi Ismail,
Thanks for writing. I added two more images up above and added, “Below is a larger screenshot for the CNAME settings.” I hope that helps. Thanks for stopping by.
I’m also working on new videos for this whole process and I’m hoping to have them up in the next few weeks.
Dear Bradley
FIrst of all thank you for the great guide.
I tried to add cname for creating sub domain
Mail.mydomain.com
and I point it to ghs.google.com as I saw in the screenshot you put on your site but unfortunately the results is page 404 from google services.
Can you help me with that matter?
Regards
Lep
Did you give it some time? It can take up to a few days.
I love this method but we want to use advance e-mailer for unlimited mails.
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Thanks for very detail informative blog. it saved my lot of time about how to configure gmail for my own domain, using dns records. before this i don’t have any idea about CNAME.
Educational Videos
Thanks for your tutorial, now i can setup my domain. Thanks again. :)
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After I applied the google app configured server mail in my drupal web forms(contact,other forms) ..mail is going to spam box , and found the mail address is not taking the google app email id.
Do your form settings allow you to connect via SSL? If so, maybe the server wouldn’t think it was spam. It’s just a guess. I’ve also had some issues with trying to send from a site where the form is (e.g. domain.com) but the email is hosted with Google and the form can’t seem to figure out where the email should be coming from–if that makes any sense to you. Hope that helps.
Thank you for this great information! I was also searching for something like this since I don’t want to have email on the same server, so this was the cheapest solution. Thanky ou