Gmail Hosting: Part Deux
As we discussed in our last post, Google is now offering email domain hosting, and we took the plunge with Turnip Network last week.
The setup process was more or less straightforward, though we encountered a little speed bump when changing our MX records. We’d be interested in hearing some "tech guy" commentary on this, but if you use Yahoo! Domains (with a custom DNS pointing to your own server, or a server somewhere other than Yahoo!), there is no way to modify the mail server. According to Yahoo!, you must change the mail server information on the domain to whose nameservers you are forwarding your domain.
Let me boil it down. In our case, we needed to modify MX/mail server entries on our server - not with our registrar. This particular situation isn’t identified in any of the Google help documentation, and it wasn’t until after some extensive sifting in Google Groups that we actually found something. Regardless, after tweaking the server, we were good to go.
You get 25 addresses to assign, each of which come with just over 2 GBs of storage. The administrator account has an e-mail address, but also provides settings/control panel for the domain. Get ready to use a new URL for logging in; good old gmail.com or mail.google.com won’t cut it. You’re given a domain-specific login (which clearly explains whatís going on) at a location like mail.google.com/hosted/yourdomain.com.
After all is said and done, youíre going to be loving Gmail, and not hating the infamous "On Behalf of" attachment to your non-Gmail addresses. Bravo Gmail; now, let us pay extra for more storage, and we’ll give you our credit cards (2 gigs simply is NOT enough).
Tags: gmail hosting, gmail, webmail
August 1st, 2006 at 8:14 am
I have signed up for this service, but now I cannot use it, as I have lost the administrator password due to a power surge in the middle of the setup process knocking my computer off, and now, as far as I can see, there is no way to recover the administrator password, and Google Support doesn’t seem to give a damn.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
[...] We talked almost four months ago about our endeavor to use Gmail Hosting as our primary email conduit; we also promised updates. [...]