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Using Google Apps email for you@yourdomain.com
By Bradley Charbonneau | Filed under Email, Help, Spam
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.
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
- Seven Reasons You Should Switch From Yahoo to Gmail
- Newest Gmail features now available for Google Apps users
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.
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.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
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
May 27th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
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
June 16th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
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 . . .
June 16th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
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.
June 23rd, 2008 at 3:29 pm
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.
October 20th, 2008 at 5:54 am
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.
December 29th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
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.
January 14th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
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!
January 16th, 2009 at 11:19 am
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.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:21 am
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.
January 16th, 2009 at 11:23 am
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.
February 2nd, 2009 at 1:19 pm
[...] are also versions for schools, non-profits, and ISPs) To get started, here’s a wonderful guide to using Google Apps email for your domain that you can either step through yourself, or pass along to your company’s IT [...]
February 22nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
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.
March 15th, 2009 at 7:13 am
I want to establish emails utilizing my domain name for other people in my organization. What’s the trick?
March 18th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
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
June 20th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Great help thanks welsh bikers
August 8th, 2009 at 5:55 am
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
September 8th, 2009 at 5:18 am
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?
October 7th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
@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.