Sunday, December 11, 2011

Gmail: The Free Replacement for Paid Email Hosting


So you purchased a domain name for your website, and you want a custom email address under that domain. But the registrar requires you to pay for the email hosting monthly. Though they are usually cheap, paying for email hosting monthly when you can use that custom email address for free would be impractical, especially if you are a small business site owner or the like. Forwarding email addresses won't look good either, as when you reply, the Sent From would show the email address the email has been forwarded to.  Solution? Simple. Use Gmail.

I know there are lots of free email hosting out there, we got some from Yahoo! -- the @yahoo.com, @ymail.com, @rocketmail.com email addresses. We have something from AOL -- @aol.com or @aim.com. And the list goes on.

One popular free email hosting is Google's Gmail, the @gmail.com email addresses. Though Gmail has far great features, there's one feature that most people are not aware of, the Reply-as feature.

In here, you can reply-as using any email address you have verified your ownership on. For example, you want to use Gmail to send an email using your @yahoo.com email address. It is possible. 

Here's how:

  1. Go to the Settings icon on the upper right corner of the Gmail interface.
  2. Click Mail Settings.
  3. And go to the Accounts and Import tab.


From there you'll find the Send mail as option where you can Add another email address you own.


 All you need to do is to verify that you are the owner of that email address. 

So how does this replace paid hosting?

Well, the first question would be: Does the domain registrar you registered your domain on offers free email forwarding? If you got a yes there, then we're on.

To give you an example, I registered the domain names of my blogs on NameCheap and they offer free email forwarding addresses.

To set your forwarding address on NameCheap, just go to My Account » Manage Domains » on Your Domains page select the domain name you want to set your forwarding addresses. Under the Email Management, click Email Forwarding Setup.

There you can setup different email address names under your domain name to forward on one singe email address you use. This time, we'll forward it on one Gmail address.

Example:

contact@yourbusiness.com to yourmainemail@gmail.com
advertise@yourbusiness.com to yourmainemail@gmail.com
merch@yourbusiness.com to yourmainemail@gmail.com
info@yourbusiness.com to yourmainemail@gmail.com
subscribe@yourbusiness.com  to yourmainemail@gmail.com

There you go! You just need to input the email addresses you set to the Add another email address you own option I mentioned above. The verification email would be sent to your Gmail itself and you verify it on the same email address. :)

Then you can go on replying to your clients or friends using different email addresses under one Gmail address you own. 

Now who needs to pay for email hosting?



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