How to Setup Professional Email Account With Your Domain Using Google Apps ?

We have already seen that how custom domain is important for our blog and How we can add it to Blogger (Blogspot) blog?, not only that, a custom email address such as name@domain.com can add four moons to the professionalism that we got by using custom domain (for blogs). It doesn’t matter whether you are individual blogger or the owner of group of websites or own a company or enterprise, this tutorial shares a step by step guide on how we can setup Email accounts with our domain using Google Apps. This Google Apps by Google was earlier free with a limit of ten Email accounts but now Google gives only one month free trial and after that charges for every single account. I am not telling you to create one with them as you can create them with your domain registrar also, but if want to give them a try then this tutorial is for you, it offers simple user interface same as Gmail with some space limitations as every other domain registrar offers. Many companies are using this service for them as it costs equal to or slightly greater than others in the market. So, let’s move on to our tutorial.

Setting up custom email using Google Apps includes four steps

        (1)   Sign up for Google Apps

        (2)   Verifying your Domain

        (3)   Set up Gmail

        (4)   Set up Billing

        (5)   Create custom URL’s

Sign up for Google Apps

      

      (1)   Go to Google Apps, click on ‘Get Started’, fill out your details and click on next.

      (2)   Choose whether you like to buy a domain or you own it and if you own it, type your domain name and click next. Don’t prefix ‘www’ before your domain, in simple words just type domain.com.

      (3)   Now you have to create Google Apps account, just choose your username and password for your customized Email such as Admin or some name whatever you want but I would prefer admin if it’s your first custom Email account and then hit next.

      (4)   You will be taken to Google Admin Console.

Verifying your domain

      

      (1)   Click on ‘Start setup’ and then next ‘Verify Domain’.

      (2)   Choose your domain registrar and if not listed there just choose ‘Other’ and hit ‘Begin Verification’.

      (3)   You are provided with two methods first one is ‘Recommended method’ and the second one is ‘Alternate Methods’. If your domain registrar is listed just go to their DNS Management and add TXT records and if your registrar is not listed just go for alternate methods. Just follow one of them and hit verify. If you are using Blogger you can add Meta tag just before </head> or you can use Google Analytics.

      (4)   You have successfully verified your domain, now let’s move on to step no 3

Setup Gmail

      (1)   Now after successful domain verification, again you will land on ‘Admin Console’. Just click on ‘Set up Gmail’ and choose ‘Google servers’ and hit next.

      (2)   Now we have to add MX records in our registrar’s DNS, if it is on Google’s list, just follow the instructions and if it’s not listed just add the default MX records. I have written a post on How to add records in your registrar's DNS?, just go through it once.

      (3)   After adding MX records in your domain’s DNS, click next. Now Google will check your MX records. NOTE- it will take up to 48 hours in updating MX records. While we move on to our next step.

Set up Billing

      

      (1)   Go to ‘Billing’ and select ‘Set this up now’.

      (2)   Choose country of your payment, choose your plan, whether ‘Annual’ or ‘Flexible’, number of user’s needed, promotion code if you have and click continue.

      (3)   Fill out your payment details and it’s done. You have successfully set up your billing.

Creating custom URL’s

      

      (1)   Creating custom URL’s is an important part of setting custom Email. From custom URL’s I just mean to say that you can always access your Email dashboard by going to http://mail.google.com/a/domain.com but if you want to change it to something like mail.domain.com then move on to this step.

      (2)   First step in creating custom URL’s is addition of CNAME records in your domain registrar DNS. Just go to ‘Create custom web addresses’ and then click on ‘step by step instruction for your domain host’ and move on to ‘CNAME record values’. Here is the list of CNAME records with their purposes.

      

        (3)   You have to add ‘Custom web address for Google Apps service’ record in your DNS which are as follows

Name/Host/Alias – mail

Value/Answer/Destination – ghs.googlehosted.com

TTL – 3600

      (4)   When you have successfully added this CNAME record, wait for some hours as I told it will take some hours to update, Go to ‘Company Profile’ from ‘Admin Console’ and choose ‘Custom URL’s. For going to ‘Admin Console’ just log on to http://google.com/a/domain.com.

      (5)   Enter your Email URL and other details and click on ‘Save changes’.

Now you have successfully created your customized Email using Google Apps. Do let us know how many of you have created your personalized Email.

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Article by Sandeep Gupta

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