How to Setup Free Mail Server for Your Own Domain with Google

Yes that’s true you can setup your mail server for your own domain, absolutely free with Google!! As we know Google having mind blowing mail servers; you will be getting IMAP, POP, Mail forwarding ….etc for free and we can trust Google and they are with us for a long time now. So here are the simple 8 steps you need to follow to setup your mail server with Google.

1) Go to Google Apps and sign up for a standard account for your domain.

2) Once you provide your info, Google will take you to your control panel/Dashboard.

3) Note that Google needs to verify that you own your domain. So click on the link to verify your domain ownership.

4) At this point there are two ways of verifying ownership, HTML and CNAME method you can use any one of this which ever convenient for you.

5) Now setting Google apps as your mail server, by using this people can send mail to ‘userid@yourdomain.com’ and it will get routed to Google apps. If you need this, then sign in to your domain hosting service and go to the DNS panel for your domain and add the following to the MX (Mail Exchanger) section. Make sure you delete the default MX entry that is already there by default. If you don’t have access to MX you need to contact your Hosting providers to set this.

Priority        Mail Server

1             ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5             ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5             ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10           ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10           ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10           ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10           ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

If hosting provider allowing only one or three MX, then choose first 1 or 3. You can use priority as same.
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6) Wait a couple of hours to settle DNS (This depends up on hosting providers). There will be a default email address which ever you passed while signing up this will be master account. If you need one more email account then go to your Google apps dashboard and “User accounts>> Create a new user” and add new email account. Also activate your Email.

7) In the “Service settings >> Email” menu you can change web addresses for accessing Email. For this create a CNAME and modify URL. This URL can be used to login to mail box (ie: click on “Service settings >> Email” menu and change the default web address to http://email.yourdomain.com or whatever you used for CNAME)

To use the custom URL email.yourdomain.com, you must change the CNAME record with your domain host.

a) Sign in to your domain hosting service.

b) Navigate to your DNS Management page. Generally be found in Domain Management or Advanced Settings, if not you need to contact your Hosting providers to set this.

c) Find the CNAME settings and enter the following as the CNAME value or alias:

‘email’

d) Set the CNAME destination to the following address:

‘ghs.google.com’

8) Wait for a couple of hours to settle DNS (This depends up on Hosting providers). Then you can access to login page of your mail box using “http://email.yourdomain.com” or whatever CNAME you set.