Wed
Sep 24
8:34pm
Gmail on your own domain
I’ve just successfully set up Gmail on my martinyoung.com.au domain. That’s not particularly relevant to the person emailing me, but it’s definitely better for me: I get all the benefits of Gmail (7gb of storage in the cloud, great spam filtering, IMAP etc etc) but with an @martinyoung.com.au address instead of an @gmail address.
If you want to have a crack yourself the instructions are here. I’ll be recommending it to my web clients - it renders the crappy webmail that you get via your hosting provider almost completely redundant.
On the web it’s the same as Gmail, but I can (and am about to) set up the account in Mac Mail to sit alongside my other email accounts. It’s just as easy to do that in Outlook.
The key is Google Apps. Read more about that here.
I’ve used zoneedit.com for years.
It’s free & simple to use. All it does is act as your nameserver and ‘web cloaks’ your domain name to the hosting and email providers you specify. Changes are instant and it frees you up to use who ever you want for web or email.
It also provides a ‘catch-all’ for email addresses which means you can send an email to anything@yourdomain.com.au (doesn’t have to actually exist) and it will forward the mail to a specific account. I use this when I sign up for memberships/accounts - I give my email address as theircompanyname@mydomain.com.au - if I receive spam or unrelated emails to that address, I know they’ve sold off my address or have a virus etc and can block everything sent to that address without losing emails from other sources.
I use gmail for our business email, but the customers don’t know. They send to specificname@mydomain.com.au and receive email from the same address (a simple setting in gmail). I setup IMAP but rarely use it as I tend to swap between PCs a fair bit.
For a more corporate appearance for staff in a SME, or if you have an appealing domain name and want to let everyone have an email address for free, where you’d change the logo etc, I think the Google Apps solution is pretty cool.
At the end of the day, it’s just an MX record change, and I prefer the additional options you get with zoneedit.com. Our business email (business@mydomain.com.au) for instance goes to gmail, but Nicole’s personal email (nicole@mydomain.com.au) currently goes to our service provider’s free webmail service. The same thing can be done with webpages and/or sub-domains. You can have either http://www.mydomain.com.au/whatever and/or http://whatever.mydomain.com.au go where-ever you want and have as many of these setup as you want. The flexibility is fantastic.
Rob.
Comment by Rob — September 24, 2008 @ 9:53 pm