It is common to own at least one domain name (if not, more..) if you are providing a service or selling products online. Most Webmasters would love to have an email for their domain name (something like kc@my-domain.com) because this will also help to increase the trust of the people who have contacted you.

The concern is that setting up an email for a new domain name may not be straightforward to most people. In addition, you can only access emails through the computer that you have installed the email client application (Outlook, Thunderbird etc). The good news is I am going to share with you one solution that will resolve all these concerns in this post =)

Google Apps (Standard Edition)

Google Apps Standard EditionGoogle has introduced the Google Apps a while back and this is one revolutionary idea to help existing Entrepreneurs who are owning a domain name in many ways.

I will only talk about the Standard Edition (which is free) in this post. You can find out more if you are interested in other features in their Premier Edition.

Although Google Apps has tons of exciting features, I will only highlight the ones that are helpful for most people:

  1. You are able to check your domain emails everywhere, anytime, as long as you are connected to the Internet.
  2. There are 7 GB of email space for each email account you create.
  3. You can create up to 50 accounts in the Standard Edition.
  4. The email account will be powered by Gmail-like interface.
  5. The best thing is, you can also decide to use your favorite email client to download your emails!
  6. Last but not least, all accounts can collaborate using Google Calendar, Docs and Sites!

Steps to set up your domain email

So once you are convinced that Google Apps is the way to go, refer to the following steps to set up:

1. First thing first, you need to register for a new domain name! You can go to GoDaddy and register one .com for less than $10 per year. With the domain name registered, go here and sign up for Google Apps.

2. The second thing is to verify that the domain name is yours =) This step is necessary as Google will authenticate you as the owner of the domain. The verification will be completed once you upload a HTML file to the domain. You can log in to the Google Apps account you signed up in step one to find the HTML file.

3. The third step is to create the user accounts for your users. This can simply be done by going to your account and select the Create Users link. Note that the Username that you create is the email id that people use to send you emails. For example, my username is KC456, then my email address for that account will be KC456@my-domain.com.

4. After you have set up the email account, it is now time to go to your server MX Records to change the pointing so that all emails will be diverted to your newly created email. Follow the guide here for setting of the MX records for your server.

5. You can now access your email through the URL: http://mail.google.com/a/my-domain.com. Replace the domain name with yours and you should be able to see the email login box =)

That’s all! You are done! Things may not be so easy if you are doing some migration from your old emails to new ones. Hence, Google Apps team has taken a lot of effort to present you a comprehensive guide that covers almost everything you want to do with the Google Apps!

My experience on using Google Apps so far

I have been using Google Apps for a few months and I am really glad that I made a switch from my old email client. Now, I also use the Docs and Calendars to coordinator tasks among my team with greater efficiency. Most importantly, these are available at no cost to us!

Enjoy and let me know your experiences!

Update: The following is a video showing how you can perform the above steps under 10 minutes.