Use google apps to setup a centralized e-mail box for your multiple domains
I have multiple domains and receive emails from mailboxes that I have setup on my host from many of the domains. As you know this can become very time consuming to keep up with, checking multiple mail accounts and responding to e-mails.
I had been searching for a “hosted” solution, one location where I could check all my relevant email on a reliable “cloud” hosted solution.
I know many of you are thinking, just use outlook on my PC.
I could have done that with multiple domain emails using the standard way you would setup an outlook or outlook express account, or any other mail client for that matter.
In the past used email forwarders from my host to a gmail account or another hosted e-mail account, the problem being when you reply to an email it comes from the gmail address and not the address that the email was sent to, it does not look very professional.
In my research I found some quite pricey hosted solutions out there, and a few with less than reliable feedback on forums that I checked out.
I finally found a solution to my problem, and got some additional features that I really was not even looking for.
If you do have multiple domains, pick the one you use the most, maybe your main business name xyz.com, then go to google, and click on the “Business solutions” link under the search box
There will be many google business solutions, click on google apps, you will then be at a page with a messaging / mail icon, and collaboration icon. On the right side of the page will be a Blue “See details and sign up” button, click it and you will go to a page where there will be a bunch of sales stuff and another button on the right that says “Begin free Trial” Read all the stuff of course.
The free trial is 30 days, then after that they charge $50.00 for the year… which breaks out to less than $5.00 a month, now this is nothing in comparison to other hosted solutions that offered similar functionality.
Once you do that you login to your google apps account, then read all the features etc..
Then you go to your hosting account where your “main” business name domain is located, you then create a CNAME record to point to googles servers, google has detailed instructions for this.
Once you get that setup you can test your email, then you can read more on goolge help while logged into your google apps account and from there you can do a few different things, you can setup domain aliases so other domains can send email to this account, that will involve changing your CNAME record on those domains, or for an easier way you can setup e-mail forwarders from your other domains.
Then you can setup “labels” for each under filters on your google apps email for your main domain email, this way each email coming in from different domains will be labeled with a unique label so you will know where it is coming from.
When you reply to one of the emails from one of your I will call it sub accounts it will read to the sender
Sent by xxx@xyz.com (your primary google apps hosted email)
On behalf of “Whatever name” xxx@abc.com (your forwarded or domain alias email)
Since this box has 25 gig of space it is more than enough
I have been a user of google’s free gmail account for years and it has been very reliable, so I would imagine their paid business solutions would be as reliable as the free accounts or even more reliable.
Also a neat feature is you can add on google labs stuff to your box.
I added something called multiple mailboxes, it uses the labels of your different emails from your other domains, and sorts them in up to 5 different panes anywhere on the page that you specify.
If you have more than 5 other domain emails either forwarded or aliases setup you can just use the filter labels to sort them out.
And of course you have the power of google search within your google apps hosted account.
I searched for this functionality for a while and only found pricey solutions that had negative feedback from clients, so far I am happy with this solution, it is serving me well, and hope this post will help other small business owners.
Cheers
ATP
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Great article! I’ve been researching for awhile today, and yours is the best written.
I’ve been using a hosted Microsoft Exchange Server (mailstreet.com) for a few years. Works great and cost is fair enough ($40/month for me & 1 employee.) BUT I’d like to have multiple email accounts for other domains without paying more. Paying LESS is attractive, too.
I’m feeling nervous to switch though! Maybe I should test it out with a secondary domain instead of my primary. Thanks for helping to clarify my decision.