Using Gmail with my own Domain for free --- but with more than 10 email addresses
phuschnickens
Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
So google offers "Google Apps" to businesses that want to use their own domain name and get a lot of the ms exchange type features but don't want to bother with managing their own server or the expense of outsourcing. If you have 10 or less email accounts you can do it for free. For 11+ it is $5/user/month. My company has 13ish email accounts on one domain but we don't have a budget to allow for this. All I want is to use Gmail's webmail interface and the reliability of their mail servers. Since we don't need the other Google Apps features, is there any way we can get 13 email accounts through Gmail using our own domain name for free? We use Outlook and I am SOOO sick of the bloat and crashing that I cry myself to sleep. I'm pretty sure the answer is no but any tips appreciated.
Thanks!
Thanks!
0
Comments
There is no way to increase the number of accounts/logins from 10 without paying. BUT..
Are some of these catch / admin addresses? Things like info@ and admin@ and support@. You can make these nicknames to just one account rather than having individual ones. Then some simple rules could sort them into Gmail folders.
Look at the addresses you actually use vs what you need. Consolidating some of these would get you in under then 10 (and thus keeping you in the free tier).
Each of our employees has an email address:
jpfulton@
rick@
lrichardson@
etc etc
Then some of us also have an additional email address:
prepress@
contact@
ads@
Google apps will let you setup a few aliases (not sure how many) for each user. So basically I can receive email at jpfulton which is actually a legit email address and also receive email at prepress which is setup as merely an alias. So that's simple and neat and all easy. Receiving mail is no problem.
As far as sending there's a little additional setup. There's a place in the gapps settings where you can add some "Send mail as" accounts which allows me to send mail FROM my jpfulton account but have it masked as if it's from prepress. However, it's not exactly ideal. In order to avoid spam filters, etc. if you choose to setup "send mail as" and have google's servers do the sending, google sends with this in the 'from' line:
"From yourusername@gmail.com on behalf of customaddress@mydomain.com."
Obviously not an ideal solution. Fortunately google also gives you the option to setup the "send mail as" address to be sent using a different mail server. I still have hosting service with inmotionhosting.com so I simply use their smtp server settings and all is golden... no "on behalf of". It looks completely clean.
If you're also (or only) going to be using an email client, eg outlook, you'll just simply setup an additional account specifically for sending email using your webhost's smtp... configuration of "send mail as" will not affect setup in outlook.
There ya go, I've successfully kept our email accounts under the 10 limit and we are able to take advantage of google apps at no charge. Hurray.
I hope this long explanation can be of assistance to someone facing the same and I sincerely apologize for the tldr-ness of it.
if you have:
icrontic@gmail.com
i.crontic@gmail.com, icront.ic@gmail.com .. etc, are all going to send mail to icrontic@gmail.com
I don't know if this works the same with Gmail for domains, but I assume it does. Maybe not helpful for this specific instance, but perhaps for others that come across this thread.
For example, you can sign up to spam with example+spam@gmail.com, and it will still go to example@gmail.com. You can just filter any email sent with +spam on it using a rule.