Honk Honk PUNCH!

(This is a the 4th of a 4 part series on setting up your own email address – if you missed part three, please check that out first)

Congrats on making that new address – and while it might have taken a little bit of reading to get through it, you have to admit it wasn’t that hard.  There are a couple of things you can do to make your life a little easier.

Remember that the address for you to log in and use your email is http://mail.google.com/a/[yourdomain]?  That is a bit of a mouthful to remember, wouldn’t it be nice if it was something easier?  Well, it can be.  In my case, it made sense for me to access my mail by something easy to recall, like http://mail.raychampagne.com.  Google apps makes it very easy to do this by going to the Control Panel (https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/[yourdomain]).  Click on the “Email” link at the top.  You should see the following on the screen:

Click the “Change URL” link there.  Now comes the time for you to figure out what you want your URL to be to access email.  It can be just about anything, but I suggest using “mail”.  It’s short, to the point, and is an inductry standard.

When you are ready to continue, your screen should look like this (click to enlarge):

Click continue.  That is all we need to do on the Google side.  The last step is hooking up the domain name so that it understands to redirect you to Google’s mail service when you type that in the browser.  If you haven’t already, go to GoDaddy’s site, log in, then go to the domain manager, then the Total DNS control.  (If you don’t remember how to do that, see the previous blog post)  Under the CNAME section scan down the left side and see if any of the “CNAME (aliases)” already say “mail” (or whatever you chose above).  If they do, delete them with the red circle/X on the right.  Then click the “Add New CNAME record” button on the right.  Under “Enter an alias” type in “mail” (or whatever you chose above), and for the address, type in “ghs.google.com”.  Click ok.  Now go back to Google and click the “I have completed the necessary steps” button.  In less than an hour (times vary), you should be able to type in http://mail.[yourdomain].com and be directed to your GMail account.  Pretty neat.

I hope this will help clear up some of the “magic behind the curtains” and you get to use the new knowledge to show how geeky-cool you really are.  Or, if you are running a small business, I hope you get a little more business because you now have a professional-looking email address.

I encourage you to dig around in the rest of the Google Apps – email is just one of the great free services they provide.  You can also set up a website with their tools.  Granted, it won’t be the next coca-cola.com, but if you’re looking to just get your presence known, it’s a great tool.

And if you know anyone who is looking to get some work done on their site, or would like to skip 4 long blog posts and just get a damn email address set up without all the  hassle, I can be reached at ray@raychampagne.com.  For a small reasonable fee, I am willing to to the leg work.