Months back when I started my website on a free server named Xtreemhost.com, I was taken by a shock that it doesn’t support/offer e-mail ID for my site like ‘admin@geekact.com’. I was very desperate to get it my exclusive one and it was only available to paid servers.
Is it really that important to have it?
Yes! As it looks nice as it is unique and exclusive. It shows that to whom the domain and site belongs. It proves that you really own your website. They can contact you there and more importantly it is like an identity. You might wish to tell public that it is your site, so giving “something@gmail.com” will not appear fine at all and will certainly raise queries.
These days, the situation is shifting. Only Paid Servers are offering e-mail services, and Free Servers are taking it away to get potential paid customers. This is dreadful as lots of people like you, and I begin with a free hosting.
However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have your personalized domain e-mail ID and space. There are other free servers and mail services, which offers you to use their system with your domain. Free servers support mail redirection systems, which automatically redirects mail coming for specific domain (your website ) to another configured Webmail server. This all works with beauty of redirections.
Redirection can be done by a choice of methods but the easiest one is ‘MX Records’. MX Record is a Mail Server Address where the said user exists. Imagine! What if you can use Gmail Service with your domain name as “yourname@yourdomain.com” with all features, same interface, ease, and space of Gmail?
Cool… Huh? Google offers service called Google Apps, for this and many other purposes. This is a free service for personal use and for up to 10 e-mails ID’s (Users) but for Business/Company, you will need to pay.
Let’s get your domain specific mail ID.
YOU WILL NEED:
- Access to Control Panel of your website like Cpanel, VistaPanel or other.
- Google Apps Account:
Free users can sign-up here: Google Apps Free
For Business and Company: Google Apps - FTP access to your server, i.e. place from where you uploaded all your website files using Online File manager or Filezilla, etc.
- MX Records for Google Apps. Don’t worry that is not a problem. It’s just here.
THE SIGN-UP:
On Google Apps sign-up pages, Put all details like this:
Page 1:
Page 2:
VERIFICATION:
In some next step, you will go through Verification and MX Records Configurations to prove that the said Site or Domain is yours. This can be skipped for the while and new Users can be created, but I feel that it is better to set it initially.
In Google Apps Dashboard, chose the way you want to verify your site ownership. Painless way is to download the HTML File and upload it to the ROOT of your website server using FTP, etc. The file shall go to root that means in the PUBLIC_HTML folder. On free servers, there can be folders with name like htdocs, etc. One simple rule, put this file in the directory in which your website’s main INDEX file is kept.
After this, Click “Verify”. If all done ok, then site will be verified. If didn’t work try uploading the same file again to Upper Directory Structures.
USERS CREATION:
Now, you will have a working Dashboard, i.e. Apps Domain Management. Create a user. You can see that, Administrator is created by default and in my case; I set its e-mail ID as Admin. Furthermore, you will need to select services which will be available to this domain and Users. It is a good idea to create “Admin@yourdomain.com” and “webmaster@yourdomain.com” as an e-mail ID’s.
MX RECORDS CONFIG:
This is a crucial step. Go to your Website’s Control Panel (CPanel, etc.) and locate for an option called MX RECORDS in Mail Management. There, you will see settings to Add and Remove MX Records. Delete all the entries, which are already there by default. We don’t want to point any mail directly to our Domain or Site as our server doesn’t have mailbox support.
Add the MX Record to your site, one by one from Google as shown here;
Google MX Records
Your Site’s Cpanel MX Records
Now, Hit OK and you are done.
Congratz you just acquired your Free Domain Based E-mail ID exclusive to you.
To check e-mails, which are sent to you on this domain, go to Gmail.com and Put Login name as ‘admin@yourdomain.com’ and then your Password for it.
To manage users and mail accounts, go to Google Apps and Login to Domain Management.
Enjoy…