March 29th, 2006

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Internet
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Hey Google, I Want to Try Gmail For My Domain

In the next few weeks, we’re moving Capulet’s site over to a new design on a Bryght site. Bryght doesn’t offer email support, so I’d like to locate an email solution that offers more than the standard SMTP from my webhost.

Boris (of Bryght) recently wrote about their beta-testing of Google’s Gmail to your domain program. This means that we can use Gmail to host (or pass on via POP) our @capulet.com email addresses. Read Boris’s account for all the upsides–it sounds like the right fit.

Boris tells me that it took them a week to get into the beta. That said, I imagine somebody at Bryght knows a guy who knows a guy inside Google. As far as I can remember (and, frankly, that’s not far) I don’t know anybody at Google. So, I’m publically pleading to be let into the beta program.

On a related note, Boris says:

Best feature? Set a few more DNS records, and every single email account can also be a Jabber account, run through Google’s talk.google.com server. Yes! Jabber world domination continues… (so add boris AT bryght.com to your Jabber buddy list).

I mention this because it recently came to my attention that all of the Jabber docs and examples use the email addresses juliet@capulet.com or romeo@montague.net. Happily, we don’t have anyone at Capulet named ‘Juliet’, or there’d be real trouble. Somebody from Jabber recently asked if we minded, and we didn’t.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

Derek K. Miller
March 29th, 2006
2:55 pm

If you don’t have many email accounts, just setting up a standard hosting account with email, and then setting your Gmail account to send and receive from your domain, works for now.

I have both dkmiller {at} pobox {dot} com and dkmiller {at} penmachine {dot} com set up that way, as well as a few other email addresses (my work, my wife’s podcast general incoming email address) configured that way, so if you get email from me, you’re actually getting it from my Gmail account, even though no one ever sees gmail.com in my email address.

It’s not as sophisticated as Google’s whole company domain offering, but it does the job for me. It does require some sort of forwarding set up from your @capulet.com addresses to your Gmail accounts, and when you set up Gmail to send “from” a domain you need to be able to receive a verification email at that address. But it’s not a bad stopgap.

[Reply]

Richard
March 29th, 2006
3:10 pm

I still say you setup the juliet@capulet.com just to see what kind of emails people send there. Probably mostly spam, though.

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donna
March 29th, 2006
3:59 pm

ditto on what Derek says. I’ve got all five of my domains pointing to my gmail account. It’s not quite as seamless as gmail’s new solution but it’s easy enough to do.

I’m still signing up. That’d be nifty.

[Reply]

Chuck Cheeze
March 29th, 2006
9:43 pm

My company email is on gmail, but with a twist. We tried the GM4Domains (just filled out the request online and within 4 days had the approval) and it was just fine, but it uses a different URL set and none of the GM checkers would work with it (XP and OSX), so it was a no go for me, at least for now.

So, I signed up for ZoneEdit and pointed the domain name to it. From there, I pointed the A records to the webhost for the web site, and used the free MailForward tool on ZoneEdit to set up email forwards to gmail. So (with abbreviations):

chad at wi.com -> chadcrowell at gm.com
heidi at wi.com -> heidicrowell at gm.com
info at wi.com -> webinception at gm.com
some others at wi.com -> webinception at gm.com

In GM, you can set it up to allow you to send from other addresses. So for my account, I set this up, and I can compose an email from my gm.com account or my wi.com account and send it. It will also reply to emails using the email addy they were sent to, so if a wi.com email comes in and I reply, its automatically from me at wi.com.

This works really well, and the checkers work to notify us of new email.

Its really great for the business, because Heidi and I can check it as necessary from wherever, and since we run alot of sites, each with their own info at xxx.com address (which is now within the webinception at gm.com mailbox), when we reply it comes from the correct address (this never happened in outlook with an exchange server). Makes life easy. And she just *’s any messages I need to reply to and vice versa.

Its a great system…good luck!

[Reply]

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