For me, Linux hosting is great, for the most part it’s straight forward, secure, reliable, and fast. But, there’s always been a sort of sore spot for me when administering my systems: email. Email is arguably the hardest part of a server to setup… securely. And for smaller sites and servers our email has been plagued by a host of problems, security holes, SPAM, getting falsely labeled as SPAM, mailbox sizes, and viruses to name a few. With the advent of Google apps, the days of hosting your own mail servers can be a thing of the past.
To get started, simply go to http://google.com/a and sign up. Google offers a basic edition, premier edition, and a pro-bono edition. I’ve always used the basic edition and found it is more than adequate for smaller sites, but, if you’re so inclined, you may want to spring for the premier edition. Simply click on the signup button:
Fill out the required information. In this example, I’m using a domain I’ve already registered with GoDaddy called theartisticweb.com.
Now you’ll need to create and administrator email account. This is the main mail account that will be associated with our domain example.com. I’ll create “admin”. This can later be changed through the dashboard if you ever need to by adding another administrator and deleting this account.
We’ve now signed up our domain with Google apps. The first thing we need to do is to validate our domain:
If you’ve used Google webmaster tools before, you’re familiar with the domain validation process. Basically we just need to create an HTML file (in this case called googlehostedservice.html) on our webserver with the text from Google inside. Just click domain validate:
Create a blank HTML file called googlehostedservice.html and add the required text to it, and upload it to your domain’s root web folder. Verify that you can read the link by clicking on it in your browser, then if all is good click verify.
The verification process is rather fast, so once you return to the dashboard, Google will probably have already verified your domain. Now we can begin the email setup.
Click on the “Setup Email” link:
Here you can choose what instructions Google will show you based on your DNS provider. Ours is GoDaddy, so I select GoDaddy from the list, and follow the instructions. Note: you must be using the nameservers of the company that is hosting your domain name in order for these insturctions to work. If not, you will need to contact your domain name’s DNS provider to change these settings for you. By default, domain names use the DNS servers of the company you purchased the domain name from, e.g. GoDaddy, so you should be ok unless you’ve changed the nameservers for your domain somewhere along the line.
Once you’ve entered the MX records exactly as shown (don’t forget a trailing “.” if applicable), click ok. It should take anywhere from 10 minutes to a day or two to update the DNS settings for your domain and Google apps. If you’ve done the steps correctly, then just be patient. You can use dnstools.com to check the status of your MX records, or on a *NIX machine type
dig example.com MX
to get a reading on your MX records. Once they’ve updated, you can then use Google’s server to handle all of your company’s email! Presto!