Setting up Email Domain Hosting

Call me crazy but I have always wanted to set up an name@surname.com email account for myself. So i checked the co.za to see if the correct domain name was available and had my good friend Greg register it for me.

What now? Who do I pay? How much? I just want to receive my emails. So I was looking for a host, and the big names that immediately popped up were Windows Live Domains and Google Hosted Services. I already had a GMail address and liked how Google ran things. Also I still had a bad taste in my mouth from using Hotmail way back in 1995 when it was not very user friendly. So I admit being biased towards using the Google system and the rest of this post will describe my experience setting up my email hosting there.

So, where were we? Oh yes, browsing around the Google Hosting site it looked like I would have to pay $50 a year per email account I was going to run on the domain for the Premier service. Then I found a link that compared it to the Standard service which met all the requirements I had for free, so I signed up.

The first thing you have to do is verify that you own the domain you are trying to receive mail on. This is done by registering a long name that looks something like google73981273.yourdomain.com to point to google.com. Google will verify this and tell you to point your domain MX records to the ones they supply and hey presto you are ready to receive mail.

I was amazed at how quickly the whole thing was up and running. Another great feature is that you can set up an easier address to access your webmail, something like mail.yourdomain.com which is very convenient for your users.

Apparently you can also retrieve your email vio POP using the following settings;

POP3 : pop.gmail.com / pop.googlemail.com
Username : your-username@your-domain
SMTP : smtp.gmail.com
Username : your-username@your-domain
Port : 587
Connection Type : TLS

...but I have not confired that yet. [Update: Yes it does work and instructions can be found here.]

I must thank Google for making their mail hosting solution so easy to set up, not to free :)