The Wahyudiharto's Blog

Owning personal domain hosted on a hosting company is one of prestige for some persons. This could be a great benefit to whom aware with that, as they could share their profiles just like personal website or blog or e-commerce online application for examples. Along with existing social networks epoch, ease of communication is one of important thing that can never be separated from web 2.0 trend nowadays. Unfortunately, not all cheap hosting provided SMTP services to manage their outgoing email from client accounts. Especially to newbies programmer who wants to develop an automation email for such of auto email notification or auto responder, this will raise a problem.

But then, thanks to Google as they can provide another free service called with Google Apps, which helpful to solve things like this. Even though this is not a latest service, Google Apps can make possibility to create email based on personal domain. For example; if you have a domain named mydomain.com, Google Apps can enable GMail to provide webmaster@mydomain.com email address. The benefit is, the SMTP and POP3 are absolutely free, so that it is possible to make an automation email responder or something similar. For advanced programmers who wants to connect their script for this purposes, you can switch to this link. In this current article, I just want to share you about how to create personal domain based email using Google Apps.

For this necessity, let assume that you already have GMail account and had signed to http://www.google.com/a successfully. First, you have to verify domain ownership by the instruction given from Google Apps dashboard links.



After finished verifying domain ownership, switch to your domain control panel given from your hosting provider (for this test, I use spanel module. Anything could be different but it has the same points). Go to Domain and DNS Manager from Domain menu and open up Edit DNS link.



You will be prompted similar display showing you current MX configuration from hosting company. Give an attention on options #7, #8, #10 - #12 on below images.



Remove options #7, #8, #10 - #12 and change to the following configuration (options #8 - 15). This will override MX setting to GMail configuration.



After you updated above settings completely, tell Email MX reception type to accept Remote MX from Subdomain Manager on the same Domain menu. This means that the primary MX is switched to Google server and will not be received at all on your hosting server.



While it proceed & still on the same menu, add a subdomain which purposed redirect to Google Apps login page from a short URL of your domain name. For example, you can create subdomain named with webmail.mydomain.com and this is alias name to your Google Apps URL.



That’s it and you’re done. Your current Google email with your active domain will be activated couple days after you had confirmed domain ownership.



After it verified, you can start to access it from your short URL (above defined as webmail.domain.com) and gained all benefits by using GMail account. Just send an email to your other email address and see that sender address is come from webmaster@mydomain.com. Trust me, it’ll works!

Labels: Google Apps