In this day and age (WTF, did I really just say that? When did I turn 70?), everyone has an email address.  In fact, it is not uncommon for many people to have 3 or more email addresses.  With all the free email services out there (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc), why not?

One thing that I notice on a regular basis that really drives me nuts is small businesses that list their email address on their business cards, signage & stationery in the form of “XYZcompany@yahoo.com”.   To me, this just oozes unprofessionalism, and really makes me wonder if said business is really in it for the long haul, or they are mailing it in.  More often than not, if I am looking to buy their product or service, I will go to a competitor that took the small amount of time and money to set up their own domain (“info@ABCcorp.com”).  It may be a silly reason to walk away from XYZ and into ABC’s arms, but in this economy with businesses failing all around us, it’s the extra effort that makes me feel more confident that ABC will be around to back its product/service.

Note that this doesn’t only apply to businesses looking to set up their own “professional” domain, it can also apply to anyone who wants to set themselves apart from everyone else.  I mean, how cool is it that when someone asks you what your email address is, you can give them a personalized address, like “ray@raychampagne.com”?  Ok, maybe it’s not cool for everybody, but it’s geeky-cool to me.  Also consider this: if you’re one of those people who has a need to network yourself to make money, how much of an edge could you gain over your competitors if you gave out your email as “firstname@firstnamelastname.com”?  I am betting that it makes more of a difference than you would think.

Here’s the funny thing: setting up your own domain with your own email address is a pretty simple thing to do.  But like most things computer-related, the process seems daunting to the non-tech savvy among us.  That all being said, I’m here to help.  The following few posts are going to explain the process in a step-by-step manner, with screen shots, tech terms explained, etc.  In the end, you will have your own domain name, with the ability to create multiple addresses associated with that domain (like “info@yourdomain.com”, “sales@yourdomain.com”, “yourname@yourdomain.com”, etc).  And you will be able to send and receive email without having to download and configure any software – it can all be done from the web, using a tool that probably works very much like the tools you’re currently used to.

In the next post, I’ll review how to set up the domain name.

In part 1, I talked about the “Why’s” behind getting a personalized email address.  Today I want to start the process.

So let’s get started.  The only things that you will need is a computer (duh) and a credit card to purchase the domain.  Don’t worry, domains are cheap.  GoDaddy sells domains for less than 10 bucks a year!

(Short note: I am going to use GoDaddy as the domain service provider and Google’s FREE Google Apps (with kickass SPAM/virus filtering) as my preferred solution.  There are many products out there, but I have found that these two combined are easy to use and set up.

Step 1: Purchase the domain name

Go to http://www.godaddy.com .  Hopefully by now you have decided on what you would like your domain name to be.  If you haven’t, go think about it for a while and come back.  Don’t worry, we can wait.

In the center of the screen, there is a box to “Search for a domain name”.  Type in the domain that you are looking to register.

Once you have found one, go ahead and add it using the “Add” button.  GoDaddy LOVES the upsell, and it will try and sell you just about everything under the sun, including the .net, .org, .info, .tv, etc versions.  It’s up to you to decide if you want all of these extra domains or not.  If you are registering a domain for a business, then this might be a good idea, just so your competitors don’t buy them.  If you are doing this for your own personal domain, then it matters much less.  (I only own the .com version of my personal domain).

When you are satisfied with your purchase options, click the “Continue to Registration” button:

Click the “No Thanks” links to opt out of all the upsells until you get to a screen that looks like this (click to enlarge):

Fill in the blanks, just like any other purchase you would make on the internet.  Click “Continue”.  Leave the domain as “uncertified” radio button selected.  Choose whether you want to buy 1 year or more.  You’ll have to renew this domain on a yearly basis for around 10 dollars.  Make sure any other upsell checkboxes or options are not selected, as they are not necessary to setting up an email address.  You are only here to purchase the domain name.

In the last section, unless you want to go through a barrage of extra upsell screens, make sure the “No thanks, I’m ready to check out” is selected.  Click Continue.

At this point, you can continue with the purchase as you would any other.  When you are done, move to the next post, “Sign Up for Google Apps“.

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.

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.