A little over a year ago I did a post about forwarding your godaddy email to gmail. This worked great for me for about a year, but I recently discovered that you can setup Google Apps for free on your domain and this is much easier to manage. I’m not going to document the process here, since their documentation is pretty easy to follow. It’s pretty much just a bunch of MX records to setup in your DNS.
Once you’re all setup, managing the whole system is super easy. Every account can have gmail, google calendar, google docs and google sites. Once you’ve got the email account setup you can forward to another email address if you want, or just use the inbox that they give you.
Thanks for this Josh! You really saved me a LOT of time, and allowed me to set up a small tutoring service at my University overnight. Its ridiculously easy, and Google pretty much holds your hand the whole way though. The best part is that I'm able to keep my Cisology emails separate from my personal email.
They also offer a lot of detailed forwarding options and group control. Makes life a breeze.
Hey I was wondering if when you switched to ipower if you tried to get google apps working with the domain once it was there…if so, I've been having some ridiculous troubles getting that process completed- any suggestions?
@Nick, I am currently on iPower and have Google Apps set up. For verifying the domain I chose the method where you upload the file to the root of your site. It found it in a couple of minutes and I haven't had any problems since.
I did the verification thing too. But when I login to Google, click Mail, which is linked to "mail.mydomain.com", it bounces me out to the Ipower webmail.
You didn't have to change any settings?
You have to access your site from Google Apps, for example I would access my domain by going to https://www.google.com/a/pathartl.me
Exactly- but then I click Inbox or Mail…and it re-directs to the Webmail Client of Ipower.
@pat: You can also setup a cname. I can get to mine by going to http://mail.joshbetz.com
helpful article …
thanks for sharing …
Do I understand correctly that if I use Google Apps, then I don't need to set up email forwarding at Godaddy?
Thanks
Right. You setup google apps and setup your MX Records in DNS (they'll tell you how to do it in the Google Apps setup) and that's it — no forwarding in GoDaddy or anything. All email management from that point on comes from within Google Apps.
Do you have a link to the (preferably easy) instructions to do this? It sounds like EXACTLY what I've been looking for!
So, after this is done, I can reply from gmail and it'll use my domain name email as the "from"? Perfect!
If you click the link and sign up, they have pretty good instructions that will walk you through it. You’ll have to be comfortable configuring DNS though. After this is setup, you’ll essentially be using the gmail servers as your email server. It’s like having a google account on your custom domain; including google docs, calendar, mail, etc.
hi is google apps free
Thanks! Lifesaver!
You effing rock dude. Saved me a LOT of time! Thank you brother,
Thank you for posting this informative article, Josh. As you may already know, Google Apps is now a paid service – I think it’s about $50 per year. I was able to forward my GoDaddy domain email adress to Google using the info from your older article – although the steps were slightly different for my account.
As of December 2012, Google no longer provides a free Google Apps (Standard) account. If you already had one then they are allowing you to keep it.