Honk Honk PUNCH!

(This is a the 3rd of a 4 part series on setting up your own email address – if you missed part two, please check that out first)

In part 2, we registered our domain name with GoDaddy.  Now we need do the legwork to get our email client set up.  An email client is quite simply just a place to store, send, read, and access your email.  If you have ever used Gmail, you have used what in opinion is one of the best email clients out there.  It is web-based, meaning it is accessible anywhere you can get internet access, it has great SPAM and virus scanning, and has some cool tools that go with it, like labels, it has virtually infinite storage, and even has great mobile smartphone apps for the BlackBerry and iPhone.  The best feature is that it is 100% FREE!

Google has come up with another product called Google Apps, which is a host of services that you can use with your own domain(s).  The standard edition is free, and will work just fine for what we are trying to accomplish.  They have other tiers of service for a yearly cost.  If you are setting this up for a business, you should really choose one of their paid levels, as they have certain guarantees that businesses usually need.

The first step is to get signed up.  To do that, go to http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html , click “Get Started”.  On the next screen, first select the radio button that says you are the domain admin, and enter the domain name (in my case, raychampagne.com).  Click Continue.

Fill out the contact information as you would any other field and click continue.

On the last screen, you will be prompted to create a new email account.  It doesn’t matter what you call it (I just use my first name).  Remember that when you are done, you will be able to have up to 50 email addresses, but this one is “special” – it will be the admin email for any future changes, so write the email and the password down somewhere.

After you submit this last form, the Google Apps account will have been set up.  The next step is getting the domain name tied to the Google Apps account, so that when someone on the interwebs sends you an email, you can actually fetch it.  This last part is probably the most technical/difficult part, but I’m going to run through it step by step.

Google will be asking you on whether you want to “upload an html file” or “chaneg a CNAME  record”.  Choose the latter and click continue.

After that, we’ll need to go back to GoDaddy to make a few changes to the domain’s DNS records.  Go to http://www.godaddy.com IN A NEW TAB OR BROWSER WINDOW.  Leave this page alone, we will need to go back and reference the code Google has given us.  Once at GoDaddy, if you are not logged in, do so in the upper right part of the page.  Once you are logged in, you should see your domain name listed.  Either click on the “Advanced Details” link or “View my domain in Domain Manager”.  You should now see a dashboard where you can change just about anything for your domain.  To add a CNAME record, we need to click on the “Total DNS Control” link in the center of the page:

We will be adding a new CNAME record as instructed by Google.  Click the “Add new CNAME record” button:

Go back to the Google window that we left open a few minutes ago.  There is a code there that we need to copy to continue.  Under step 2 on the Google Apps page, there is a code.  Copy that.

Now go back to the GoDaddy window or tab.  In the spot where it asks for an Alias, paste the code you just copied in, and for the domain name, enter in ‘google.com’ (without quotes):

Click Ok.  Now go back to Google Apps page and select the “I have completed the necessary steps” button.  We have now gotten the CNAME record set up.  There is only one more step in the process, which is activating the email account in Google Apps by adding another record to our domain.  You should be sitting at a screen that is asking you if you want to launch a tutorial.  Click “Skip”.  On the next page, click “Activate Email”.

The next screen will give you instructions of how to add the MX record.  No need to worry about reading it, I will sum up the important steps here.  First, go back to the GoDaddy domain manager and remove the current MX records by clicking the red X in the “MX records” section (click the below image to see full-size version):

Do this for all the entries in the MX record section.  An MX record is called a “mail exchange” record, so when someone sends an email to you at your new domain, the magical internet knows where to route the message.  In the next step, we are going to add an MX record that will point to Google Mail.  We will need to add in 5 new records for this to happen.

After all the entries are gone or say “Pending Removal”, click on the “Add MX record” button.  A new box will appear to add a record.  Add the following:

Host Name: @

Enter Goes To Address: ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

Priority: 10

TTL: 1 hour

Click ok.  Repeat that last step 4 more times, using the following table as a guide:

When you are done, you should have 5 entries there, and it should look similar to this (click the image to zoom in).  Don’t worry if the status says “Pending”.  That doesn’t matter right now.

Now go back to Google and click the “I have completed these steps” button:

The last step is to log in and check your mail.  Go to http://mail.google.com/a/[yourdomain] (replacing [yourdomain] with the domain name you chose).  So my mail address for raychampagne.com would be http://mail.google.com/a/raychampagne.com.  Once there, you can access your mail from anywhere there is internet by logging in with the username and password you created earlier.

Next post – changing that pesky long URL above to something more easy to remember.