I always wanted a personalized email address like you@yourdomain.com, but it never ended up how i wanted it, until now. Sure it’s easy to setup your own email server or register for GoDaddy’s email solutions, but they’re ugly. If you setup your own server have fun getting your mail from the road, and GoDaddy’s webmail shouldn’t even be considered a real email solution. Here’s a way to get everything you’ve ever wanted, and more.
#Send and Receive you@yourdomain.com email in Gmail
For this I used GoDaddy since they’re my domain registrar and webhost. I also setup an email forwarding account, so there is no actual inbox for the address I setup. It is true that Gmail can receive mail from POP3, but it only checks once per hour. This may be fine if it is an account that doesn’t frequently receive mail, but if this is one of your main email addresses you’ll probably want to receive the mail as if you were checking the actual mailbox for that account. The email forward just redirects the email to another account and you get it at the same time you normally would. Additionally, you can only recieve mail through 5 POP3 accounts from Gmail, so if you have more than five websites that you want to receieve mail from you won’t be able to get it all through Gmail unless you just forward the mail to Gmail.
If you’ve you’ve ever bought a domain or hosting from GoDaddy you might have tried they’re webmail service, but more importantly, you probably have more free email forwards than you could ever use. I wasn’t even aware that I had access to any email forwards until I went looking for the solution to this problem.
The first thing your going to want to do is sign in to your GoDaddy account and click “Email” under “My Products” on the left.
Then you want to click on “Email Forwarding Plans“. For me it was right in the middle of the page in the “Email Plans” section.
Now, you will most likely have free credits if you’ve ever bought anything from GoDaddy. Find the type of credit that you want to use and click “Use Credit“. A box will show on the right side with a dropdown of domains that you own. Select the domain that you want to use it with and click “Continue“. If the account doesn’t show up right away you might have to refresh that page a couple of times.
Then your going to click “Manage Account“. On the next screen click “Add” and fill out the details for the email address you want to create and the Gmail address you want to forward to and click “OK” at the bottom right to save. You can also click the “Bulk Address” option if you are adding more than one address.
Now your going to login to the Gmail account you forwarded the address to. In order to send email from that address you need to go to “Settings“, “Accounts“, and add the address under “Send Mail as:“. This will send verification to that email address to make sure you can send mail from that account. Make sure you change the “When receiveing as message:” value to “Reply from the same address the message was sent to“.
Go back to the inbox and there should be a verification email there, since you already forwarded the account to Gmail. Open that email and click the link. You’re Done! Now all the email you get at that personalized address will go to your Gmail inbox and when you reply it will be from that personalized address.
Optional: If you want to be able to sort through multiple email accounts in your inbox you can setup a label for that account. Just go to “Settings“, “Filters“, and click “Create a new filter“. Put the email address you want to be able to filter in the “To:” field and click continue. Then check the box next to “Apply the label” and choose “New label” from the dropdown. That’s it. Type the name of the label and you’re done.
Update: The new/better way to do this is with google apps.
