I just love when google do no evil and offer a great service like google for your domain. I host websites as part time on my server, Recently i understood that half of the websites i host just setup a forwarding accounts to various online email services like gmail and such.

So today when my newest client setup his website he asked me if he can forward emails to gmail and such so i decided to offer him the option to use google for your domain service instead of opening a gmail account and forward emails there.

basically its pretty idiotic for emails to go thru 50 billion servers along the way just to be forwarded to a gmail account so i went along and opened google for your domain service account at google.com/a (how i love those short urls).

The experience was painless and effortless , although it wasn’t a point and click. there are alot of changes you need to make inorder to make this service work.

1. 1.First you need to alter your mx records for your domain to be forwarding to google’s mail servers. this isnt easy at all and i needed to talk to my hosting company and assist them in changing the mx records.
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2. 2.Secondly after i managed to change the mx records i thought that was it. then i came to realize i need to ‘verify’ the domain ownership by uploading a simple html file to the website with a code they provide inorder to verify. this step wasnt written anywhere. and they hardly let ya know that you need to click ‘Ok, Lets finish this step’ button at bottom of each page to actually make something happen.
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3. 3.After i managed to go thru all this setupping i finally managed to login and activate the services. you need to wait for an hour for the email to be active although its active after 20mins for receiving you need to wait for an hour inorder for gmail to let you send an email.

After the whole process i started exploring the wonderful service. it offers all of the basic features that google offer like calender, email, chat, contacts and starting page. all of them can be fully customizable for your company brand with custom logo and colors which is a big advantage to microsoft.live service that is bulky and hard to operate.

all in all i had a good experience with working with this service. the client is already familiar with working on gmail interface and apps. they throw in a few nice features like sharing contacts and other info between google domain users and colab. its fresh and fast. you dont need to worry about any diskspace on your server or downtime. the mx records are not related to your website. even if your website is down you can still receive email messages in most cases because its a dns record and not a service that needs to be up.

I suggest any hoster or anyone that has alot of domains to use this service. i enjoyed using it and my client is super satisfied with it.

Go google!

   
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