Hard to keep in touch when your work e-mail changes, or you change internet provider at home (and thus the address changes) and you’re not too happy with the advertising that goes with some of the free e-mail services?Getting your own domain (like langvass.org or dagbladet.com) is easy and cheap. To setup e-mail addresses using Gmail this is almost easier. And people don’t even have to notice that you are using Gmail.
Why Gmail?
The fact that Gmail has an impressive spam filter, is easy to use, has good e-mail search, can be used with regular POP e-mail programs (such as Outlook) and gives you a lot of space (2,7 GB at the moment and it is increasing) makes this a better solution than anything you can pay for.
Like even if you have a webmail and e-mail system at work you might want to setup a Gmail account for it and forward the e-mail to Gmail.
Because you can never be sure that Google will keep the setup as nice as it is today, you might want to make yourself independent by buying your very own domain. (And you might already not be to happy with how Google yielded to Chinese government demands on censoring the Chinese version of Google.) That means if you turn away from Google in the future your friends can still keep writing you at the address you setup.
So, as I’ve done this for a couple of friends I thought I’d try to explain how to you all. If you have questions just ask.
The first step would be to get yourself a Gmail account if you haven’t got one already. Head over to www.gmail.com and use your mobile number to get an account or ask me for an invitation and you won’t have to give away your number. If you don’t want to use Gmail… ask and I’ll see if I write something about that too.
Step two is to register the domain and setup the forwarding of addresses. The best place I’ve found to register domains so far is a www.domaindiscover.com , they charge $10 per year for .org and .com domains. The good thing is they allow you to create as many e-mail forwarders as you want, meaning that if others in your family want to have an address that is no problem.
So on their webpage you type in the desired domain name in the domain registration box. Note that someone else might have taken the domain which is easiest, then you could try with other top level domains.
If you have troubles checkout their FAQ or ask me.
Step three is to configure your domain with e-mail forwarding to go to your gmail account or any other address you prefer. This you can do once you’re logged into Domaindiscover after you have bought the domain. Click on e-mail service and add “e-mail forwardâ€.
Step four is to add the new domain you registered to Gmail so that you are allowed to send as that address. This is not strictly necessary but will make your friends less confused, since you will appear to be sending from the same address you ask them to write to. Gmail describes how you do this in their FAQ.
You might want to set your new address as the default sending address, if not you will still be confusing your friends.
If you need some help just ask and I’ll help out, it is pretty easy but I can see that this becomes too techy for some. Takes me 10 minutes to do this so no problem to do it for you.