Gmail is without doubt, the daddy of email providers. Anything else pales in comparison and to be honest, i haven’t even tried anything else lately as gmail does everything I want and more.
When setting up a website, particularly for a business/professional, you can use gmail in two ways;
info@sitename.com
infositename@gmail.com
The latter is a simple click and go setup which just involves filling out a few details then registering your @gmail.com address. The former is a little more complicated, but i’m sure you’ll agree it’s worth it. It’s little detail like this which helps build confidence in potential clients and lets them know you’re a perfectionist.
Anyway, i’ll now guide you through a 3 step process.
1. Assuming of course, you have your own domain name, go to google.com/a and set up a free account. Fill in all your details, then choose a user name and password etc….
2. Once you have that done, you’ll get through to an admin panel like below and you’ll need to verify you own the domain.
The easiest way to do this to to create a file called googlehostedservice.html and put whatever bit of text it says to put inside it (something like ‘googleffffffffb7815a91′).
Upload that to your root folder i.e http://mysite.com/ so that once uploaded, you should be able to see the text you uploaded at http://mysite.com/googlehostedservice.html
3. Next you’ll need to change the domains MX records which will basically surrender email hosting to gmail, rather than your own host.
Log in to your cpanel or equivalent, provided by your domain host. Google provide step by step guides for many hosts here, but i’ll try my best to explain how to do this using cpanel.
Once logged in to cpanel, click on ‘mail’ as seen below;
now click on ‘Modify Mail Exchanger’
Once you’ve done that, you should see your domain name, click ‘change an mx entry’ at the bottom of the page.
Choose your domain name from a drop down list, then add ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM to the next field and click ‘change’.
If all went to plan, that should be it
You now have a personal domain email with gmail
You now have a personal domain email with gmail
Note that it may take a while (up to 2 days) for google to verify and the new changes to kick in to effect, so you mightn’t be able to send/receive email for a while. You’re new email login will now be http://mail.google.com/a/mysite.com
Of course the other benefits of using gmail are basically 100% uptime, water tight security and an almost unlimited storage tank for those emails (6gb at the minute).
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