Using gmail or website email

[BlitzWarTank]

Currently I'm used to gmail interface but I have not tried my own hosting email and I'm not sure how it works.

Lets say contact@mywebsite.com, what program can I view my email with it?

And how do I setup?

 

[davidktw]

Currently I'm used to gmail interface but I have not tried my own hosting email and I'm not sure how it works.

Lets say contact@mywebsite.com, what program can I view my email with it?

And how do I setup?

Go setup Google Apps. Then you can have Google manage your emails for your domain. USD$5/month/user.

 

[ykgoh]

Go setup Google Apps. Then you can have Google manage your emails for your domain. USD$5/month/user.

I guess this involves editing the domain mx entry to point to Google servers. As to how Google server would know which email address is mapped to which custom domain, this I am curious.

 

[davidktw]

I guess this involves editing the domain mx entry to point to Google servers. As to how Google server would know which email address is mapped to which custom domain, this I am curious.

Yes you will need to amend your domain MX records which Google app will provide so that all mails will then be served by Google app. What do you mean by which email to which custom domain? Don't get your question for this part.

 

[ykgoh]

Yes you will need to amend your domain MX records which Google app will provide so that all mails will then be served by Google app. What do you mean by which email to which custom domain? Don't get your question for this part.

I am thinking of how it works through DNS. When a mail transfer agent tries to send an email to the right server, it consults the DNS MX records for company.com, which points it to probably a Google owned server e.g. mail.google.com or something. Then it sends to that server.

When mail.google.com receives a mail for xyz@company.com. How does it know it is a valid domain for a Google Apps customer? I am guessing the Google Apps user has to configure something on Google side to make it recognize his custom domain too.

I did a bit of Googling and it seems to me Google uses CNAME record for this custom domain support. Will spend more time digging this if time permits.

 

[ykgoh]

Ok just to clarify. The instructions regarding the editing of MX record is here: https://support.google.com/quickfixes/answer/6252374?hl=en

The CNAME is just a convenience for users trying to access the web interface as mail client to access emails. For example if we want to allow our company users to access the Web interface for reading emails at mail.company.com, we can define a CNAME to point it to the Google mail Web server instead.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/53340?hl=en

This creates the effect that opening http://mail.company.com in the web browser actually directs the user to http://www.gmail.com in the background. Note that gmail.com is for the public Gmail and not for the paid Google Apps mail, just using it as an example.

 

[davidktw]

When mail.google.com receives a mail for xyz@company.com. How does it know it is a valid domain for a Google Apps customer? I am guessing the Google Apps user has to configure something on Google side to make it recognize his custom domain too.

I will answer you this since the rest you have already got the answer. When you sign up with Google App, you have to add in your domain name for account provisioning (and then you need to verify that you own the domain [forgotten this part if is necessary])

 

[BlitzWarTank]

Go setup Google Apps. Then you can have Google manage your emails for your domain. USD$5/month/user.

If I don't want pay, what other program can I use?

 

[ykgoh]

If I don't want pay, what other program can I use?

Your web hosting free emails I think usually is some sort of standard IMAP or POP3 email, you can use a rich desktop application to download and read the emails. As long as you point your email application to the correct IMAP and SMTP mail servers, with any required encryption settings. Can use Thunderbird or your Microsoft Outlook.

Alternatively, you can also explore how to configure your web hosting email to redirect/forward to your Gmail account. most likely your web host is using something like cPanel.

 

[alanwade123]

contact with your hosting provider they will provide a link where you can connect domain email

 

[potshot]

if you want free email server..

you can try zoho

 

[localITguy]

Go setup Google Apps. Then you can have Google manage your emails for your domain. USD$5/month/user.

for 1 user is okay.

if you have alot it will cost like crazy

 

[davidktw]

for 1 user is okay.

if you have alot it will cost like crazy

If you are just looking at the cost of hosting 1x email server, spread across X number of users, then the sole cost of just USD$5/user/month is a lot.

But when you consider the following points, then it may not be really a lot per say

• Cost of your engineers (inclusive of pay increments, training, upgrading)
• Cost of DC hosting + servers + backup + monitoring
• Cost of software (not necessarily everything is open source or free) [remember the experience of the kind of engineers a company employ also have its cost]
• Cost of actual backup, actual OS + apps patching, upgrades
• Cost of redundancies systems
• Cost of spammers eating up your inbound network

We also need to think in terms of beyond just email, google docs, spreadsheet or the norm, for Google Apps.

The business portion of google apps also allows you to manage your mobile devices, generate reports, SSO integration(SAML) and more.

When you consider all these, that USD5/month might be a bargain, since it seems all these are off-loaded from your daily operations and you don't really need to employ these staffs to manage these things.

 

[ykgoh]

for 1 user is okay.

if you have alot it will cost like crazy

If the per user pricing adds up too much, can use the traditional IMAP/POP3 emails from normal web hosts. Most web hosts bundle this service and some allow many, if not unlimited number of email accounts. For most small businesses, they probably need only 5 to 20 email accounts. Think can configure from the cPanel.

But reliability and uptime of the email server, and whether emails go missing is dependent on the web host. Certainly the big boys like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo would be more trusted to have proper fail over, backup, and recovery procedures for their servers in place. Some small web hosts can be fly by night one man business in a garage that closes down overnight.

 

[magix]

I would use godaddy sg they have product hosting + microsoft 365 email svc.

The thing about gmail is that, it been block in china. So if you travel to china you had no access to your email.

If you do not wish to use web interface, you can opt for software like outlook and Thunderbird to read the email.