Your Own Gmail

As an alternative to buying Gmail for business, you can use a free, personal Gmail account with your own domain name, your company email, or a ‘vanity’ email account you might have. It’s easy to setup Gmail to let you send email as if you were using that email account. These days using webmail is much easier (and safer) than downloading email to a program (like Outlook) onto your computer. If your computer should crash, all your email and stuff would be gone forever! And the best thing is, you can use webmail on multiple devices (computers, tablets, smartphones) and it’s the same on all of them – any change you make on one device shows on all of them.

Now, of all the freebie email/webmail services out there (like MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo mail, AOL, etc.), Gmail is – in my opinion – the best. Google is outstanding at fighting spam, excellent at helping you organize your email, and very good at importing mail, contacts etc. from another service provider.

But if you also have an email account like from your company or a ‘vanity’ email account, it would be nice to be able to use the Gmail website to send email out using that other address, rather than having to fire up two email programs. Here’s how:

If you don’t already have a Google account, go to gmail.com and set one up. That’s easy and fast! Just visit https://www.gmail.com/intl/en/mail/help/about.html and click the blue Create an Account button. Then follow the on-screen instructions. You’ll choose an address (the part that goes in front of @gmail.com) and password (create a good one), tell them a little about yourself (tell them the minimum), and complete the setup, then you’re good to go!

Now before you jump in and setup Gmail for your own domain name address, you’ll need to know a few things. You need to know the name of the mail server that your other account uses to send mail. That could be something like mail.yourdomain.com, but make sure you also know the name of the outgoing mail server (usually SMTP). You’ll need your domain email address and password, and you’ll need to know if that system uses POP or IMAP. And if that mail server uses a specific port to send email out (like 587 or 2525), you’ll need to know that too. Once you have all that info, go back to Gmail to setup access:

1. Click the gear icon in Gmail and that opens a menu. Click Settings. Look across the top of the Settings window and click the Accounts and Import tab.
2. In the Send mail as section, click the ‘Add an email address you own’ link to open a dialogue box. Type in your other email address, uncheck the box ‘Treat as an alias’ and go to the next step.
3. Choose to send through your other email account. Add your SMTP server name (that’s the outgoing mail server name, like ‘smtp.yourdomain.com’), your username and password, and change the port number if necessary. Only change the option for secured connection if your email system requires it. Then click the ‘Add Account’ button.

Now you’ll get an email in that other account with a verification link which you must follow. Once you do that, from that point on you can send email out using that other address but using your Gmail account and nobody need know you’re using Gmail.

If you aren’t able to get your SMTP server name, you can choose to have Gmail send emails out. They’ll still have your other email address in the From box, but that From address will be expanded to show that it’s coming from Gmail.

Last step, you’ll go to the next section, Check Mail from Other Accounts. Here you can add your email account so it brings your email into Gmail. If you need to enable POP or IMAP, do that on the Forwarding & POP/IMAP tab. Notice there’s a Save Changes button at the bottom of these settings menus. Complete setting up the Check Mail from Other Accounts section, and Gmail will start downloading your email.

At this point you don’t need to visit the other email service, you can do everything within Gmail. Since you’re doing this all within your web browser, it doesn’t matter what kind of computer you use.