In this episode I show you how to sign up for and configure google apps. This allows you to have free gmail style email on your own domain name. It’s easier than you think.
Show notes after the breakWordpress Tutorial
Setting up Google Apps including Free Email
Hi and welcome to the fifth episode of the wordpress video howto podcast. Today I’m going to show you how to use google applications to get email for free.
So if you remember all the way back to episode one, I told you not to sign up for any email. The reason is we’re going to use google apps. They offer basically a domain version of gmail for free and that’s what we’re going to set up for free. The nice thing about this is your web site as you know is hosted with hostgator. If you ever switch hosting providers you don’t have to touch your email, you don’t have to worry about transferring email, any of that.
So the first thing we need to do is go to the google apps page and I will put the address at the bottom of the show notes because it’s kind of a long address. What we’re going to do is click on here and we’re going to sign up for the free edition. That will give us all the application, gives us 2.75gb of storage space and unlimited user accounts.
Ok so we want to use an existing domain and we’re the administrator. We’re going to type in the domain name and gets started.
So my number of users im going to say 5. And I have to fill in my information. And for email address it does have to be a currently valid email address so you can’t use the one you’re creating. And you do have to check off I understand. Don’t have to fill in all of this information, and click on Continue.
Now you get to pick a username. If you want to make it easy you could do it the same as your hosting account. And I’m not going to sign up for junk mail. And I’m going to accept and continue. So there we go I’ve set up my google apps account. Now what I need to do is verify that I own the domain. So I’m going to click on this and I need to verify my domain ownership. We’ve got two links, by an HTML file or by a CNAME record. I’m going to choose CNAME record because I think it’s a little bit easier.
So what we need to do now is go over to Godaddy and I’m going to log in. I’m going to go into domains, don’t click just move your mouse over it and then my domains. And I’m going to edit this domain so I’m just clicking on it. And because I didn’t give up domain control before by setting them to Hostgator I do have total DNS control.
So there’s going to be several things we are going to do here. The first thing we need to do is add a new CNAME record called this, and it has to point to google.com.
So here I am under CNAMES. I’m going to add a new CNAME record. The Alias is going to be what Google gave me. It’s going to point to google.com. And that’s it, you’ll see it here and here, I will verify. And it does say they’re checking, it doesn’t take 48 hours, it’ll take a couple of minutes.
So now that I’ve done that, while I’m waiting for that to happen I want to configure my MX records. So I’m going to go into Help, and configuring MX records. And I’m going to get them specifically for Godaddy. And here we are.
So back in in my total domain, back here, I’m going to go to MX and I’m going to delete the ones that are there. And now I’m going to start adding. So this is pretty easy, just add them exactly as it shows. Here they are set up and ready to go. The one thing you do need to be careful about is if you are copying and pasting from here, there is periods at the end – you do not want the periods. So if you copy them delete out the periods otherwise your email will Fail.
So now that that’s done, we have finished setting up Google Apps. We could actually go ahead and start using email at this point, however there are some configuration things we’re going to do to make it easier to use and to set up some custom email addresses.
The first thing I”m going to do is I want to change the address for email. Right now if I want to access my email I have to go to this address which is not easy to remember. So I’m going to change the URL, and I’m going to make it easy – I want mail.teachmewp.com. And to do that I have to set a CNAME record, mail has to point here. Since I’ve got Total DNS Control, that is easy.
I’m going to go back up here. I have mail here already so I’m going to edit this one, and I’m going to change it to that. And then I’m going to go back to Google Apps and I’m going to say I completed it.
Now you can also do the same thing for your other Google Applications – Calendar, docs, sites, chat, I’m not going to do those for now.
So there is one more thing I’m going to do. Right now I have one user, that’s me, that’s dholowiski. So right now there is only one email address – dholowiski@teachmewp.com. That’s no good because I’ve been giving out the podcast email address so I need to set up that. Rather than setting up multiple accounts which would mean multiple mailboxes that I’d have to check I’m just going to set up aliases so that everything else I set up just goes into my mailbox.
Google actually calls aliases Nicknames and to set them up you have to click on your account, and this will bring oyu to your information. And you want to click on nicknames, so I want to add a nickname and I want to add podcast. Now if anyone sends email to podcast@teachmewp.com it will show up in my mailbox. I always add a couple others, I’m going to add webmaster, I’m going to add dave, and I’m going to add david.
And now you’ll see I have all of these email aliases that go right into my mailbox.
And I’m going to go back to my dashboard, and it doesn’t say that it needs to be verified anymore and all services are running smoothly and we are ready to go.
Setting up google applications really is that easy.
If you want to see proof, I’m going to go to mail.teachmewp.com. It’s going to bring me to my login page, and there we have it, free email for my own domain. You can set up as many accounts as you want for different domains.
So that’s all for the tutorial today. As always you can go to the web site, teachmewp.com and you can leave comments on the show. if there;s anything you’d like to see done or any questions go ahead and do that. You can now also email me at podcast@teachmewp.com and it will come right into this mailbox.
Have a great day!
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