Setting Up Google Mail for Your Own Domain

Apr
23
2008

After some recent restructuring of my business (I'm now 100% owner of Pragmapool) and ongoing problems with the server that this and my other sites sit on, I'm migrating all of my sites over to Mosso. I'll probably go into why I chose them and why I'm willing to recommend them even before I've moved all of my sites over at a later date. What's relevant for today is that one more than one of those domains, the email is actually more important than the site on that domain.

With several accounts that average 2000-3000+ spam messages a day, dealing with the email on the new server didn't exactly appeal to me. Having heard about how some plenty smart people enjoyed the switch over to outsourcing their email to Google, I figured I'd give it a shot.

The thing about Gmail (and Yahoo mail and Hotmail) is that lots of large companies actually block them. When you do the contract development gig like I do, that can get in the way of actually doing your job. None of those companies block any of my domain names.

So, I followed all of the instructions for changing the MX DNS entries to point things over, set up the email accounts and was able to send and receive email. However, even when setting up webmail.example.com, the browser still gets forwarded to Google's domain.

Fortunately, Google recently added IMAP access. When you combine that IMAP access with a copy of Squirrelmail installed directly on the domain, you can use any of:

  • The GMail interface that many know and love
  • IMAP access using Thunderbird, Outlook, etc.
  • Squirrelmail access
to access the spam-filtered, giant inbox that Google provides while still using your own email addresses. 
There are a couple of things to note for doing the IMAP setup.
  1. You need to enable IMAP access to each account from the "Settings" link in your custom GMail.
  2. When you set up your IMAP access, instead of your user@gmail.com email address as the login, you need to use your user@yourdomain.com address.
  3. After that, it works like a charm.
While most of my email filters down to a single account, I believe I will be setting things up like this for pretty much all of the domains as I move them over to the new server setup. It's clearly going to make things better.

Posted in General, Personal, Technology |

 

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Feedback is always welcome. Read some from other folks or leave your own below. Just keep things civil and remember that what you post lives on in public. Forever.

Thanks,
J

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