Google Mail and Google Apps Setup

This article provides step by step instructions on how to set up Google Apps (with screenshots).

Google Apps is a service from Google enables you to have email addresses at your domain name – for example, joe@yourdomain.com. Each Google Apps user you set up has access to Google Mail (aka Googlemail), Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Using Google Apps works like this:

• Google provides your Mail Server – mail.yourdomain.com – free for up to 10 mailboxes as part of Google Apps
• You set up Users (a User = Email Address + Mailbox)
• You access your mail via Google’s webmail interface or any old POP/IMAP email reader (like Outlook or Mac Mail)

Using Google Apps (free for up to 10 users) for your business email can be a fast way to launch a business with professional email services. If you need to, you can upgrade later on as your business grows. Google Apps for Business costs $50 USD/user per mailbox, and comes with a larger mailbox sizes (25Gb instead of about 7Gb).

This article provides you with step by step instructions on how to set up and use Google Apps at your own domain. You might find it easiest to read it through once to understand what you need, and then collect the information you need before starting the setup.

How to Get Help: If you decide it looks a bit hard and just want Google Apps set up for you, you can go to the Google Apps Marketplace to find a partner who you can pay to do it for you. If you want Google Apps and a WordPress website using OM4′s Managed WordPress Hosting – well, see the end of this page for details of our Google Apps and WordPress package, which will get you up and going quickly.

Step 1: Register Your Domain

You’ll need a domain to use for Google Apps. You can register one with any domain registrar.

Google do offer you a domain registration service when you sign up for Google Apps – if you do some research (using Google) you may find a few cries for help from brave souls who have gone down that path. Google is a great search engine, but maybe not totally focussed on being a domain registrar – so if you are going to start something online, consider taking the plunge and choosing your own domain registrar.

When you register a domain to use it for Google Apps, you’ll need access to DNS. So make sure you choose a registrar that lets you manage your DNS.

Step 2: Sign Up For Your Account

Go to the Google Apps page and sign up for your account. Google will give you plenty of opportunity to choose the (paid) Google Apps for Business option, but if you just want to use the free version, stick with the 10 user Google Apps account.

Get Started with Google Apps for Free

Enter the domain name that you’ve already registered to get started. This is Step 1 of 3 in the Sign up

Now you’ll need to fill out the master account details. Nothing hard here, you’ll get a warning that you can’t do anything if you can’t set up your DNS records.

Google Apps Sign Up 2 of 3 (click to enlarge)

Finally, create your first administrator account. If you are only going to use Google Apps for yourself, make this your primary email address (e.g. joe@yourdomain.com). Complete the Captcha (if you can) and the first stage is complete.

Step 3: Google Apps Wizard (Express)

If you choose the Express Setup option, you’ll next be presented with the Google Apps Setup Wizard.

Google Apps Setup Wizard (click to enlarge)

Google says this will take less than an hour. If you are pretty good with technology, this is reasonable guidance. But if you aren’t that familiar with DNS, be prepared for a steep learning curve. A lot of people find DNS very confusing, so if you need to take your time and reread articles a few times, don’t worry about it. You are normal.

Step 4: Verify domain ownership

Ok, best to jump in and get this sorted, and not put it off until last.

You have 4 ways to verify domain ownership.
1. Upload an HTML file to your server (if you have web hosting configured)
2. Add a Meta Tag to your home page (if you have a home page configured)
3. Add a DNS record to your domain configuration (welcome to DNS land)
4. Use your Google Analytics account (if your site is configured and you have Google Analytics configured).

If you are just setting up Google Apps, you might be best off following the DNS instructions for your registrar to create a TXT record and verify using DNS.

Google are pretty good at giving you detailed instructions on how to set up the required DNS for different registrars – you might need to trawl through this list to find yours: Setting Up DNS at Different Registrars

Enjoy the green tick when you get it. DNS isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.

Verification Successful

Step 5: Users and Groups

Now we are going to add Users to your Google Apps account. Before starting this, you’ll want to make up your mind what email addresses you want to use, and how users, mailboxes, groups and nicknames relate back to email addresses. And what forwarding means. Having a good understanding of these terms and what they mean in your Apps account helps a lot.

email address: an address that can receive email, for example joe@yourdomain.com – there are three different ways to create email addresses. People sending email to these addresses won’t be able to tell the difference, it all comes down to how you want your email to work.

user or mailbox: these are tightly related, each user in your account has a real mailbox. You can have up to 10 user accounts in the free Google Apps account, and that means up to 10 mailboxes. A mailbox can store an email message.

groups: an email group is a collection of email addresses, with its own email address as an identifier. For example, info@yourdomain.com might be a group, and joe@yourdomain.com might be a member of that group. Emails sent to info@yourdomain.com automatically get sent on to every member of the group. Groups create email addresses for your business, but don’t count towards your 10 user limit.

nicknames: a nickname is another name for a user. So joe@yourdomain.com might have a nickame of jo, which means jo@yourdomain.com is also a valid email address. Any email sent to jo@yourdomain.com goes into the joe@yourodmain.com mailbox automatically. Nicknames create email addresses for your business, but don’t count towards your 10 user limit. You could make sales a nickname for joe@yourdomain.com if you want to use a generic email address.

Ok, now you are a full bottle on users, mailboxes, groups and nicknames, you can create your some.

Users And Groups

Go through the steps and choose to add users one by one in the control panel.

At the top of the Google Apps Control Panel (which is what the Wizard sits within), you’ll see a number of tabs across the top. Click the Organization and Users tab and you’ll see your administrative user listed. Click on it to see how you can edit the profile – this is where you set up nicknames (you can have several nicknames for each user). Click on Create a New User to add new users.

If you want to create another user that can administer your account, use the Privileges link under the Organization & Users tab.

If you want to create groups, use the Groups tab at the top of the control panel, right next to the Organization & Users tab.

Step 6: Your Logo

This is a good time to set up your Google Apps account to display your logo at the top left of your Google Apps screens.

Use Domain Settings, Appearance to complete this task. You’ll first need to prepare you logo in PNG format and size it to exactly 143px wide by 59px high. And don’t include any Google trademarks.

After you’ve uploaded AND saved your logo, it could take several hours before you start to see it.

Step 7: Activation and URL setup.

Ok, time for the fun stuff. You need to activate your email before it will work. And if you want to use your email, calendar and docs via the web, you’ll probably want to set user friendly URLs so you can access mail at mail.yourdomain.com

So here we go.

Click the Dashboard link at the top left. Dismiss the Setup Guide panel to clear a bit of junk from the screen.

Under Google’s clutter you’ll see the Service Settings section.

Check the large blue Email link. If your email service hasn’t activated yet, activate it now by clicking the Email link.

To change the URLs for your service, go to Dashboard, Settings, Email (you might have to scan for those links, as Google places them across the top and down the side). Notice the Change URL link and click it.

Notice the blue Change links for all Domain Services and click that.

Now you will be able to set up your user friendly URLs for mail, calendar and docs.

For example:
mail.yourdomain.com
calendar.yourdomain.com
docs.yourdomain.com
sites.yourdomain.com

Once you have saved these URLs, you’ll need to set up the DNS to make them work. This involves following the instructions to create CNAME records (these are another kind of DNS record).

Step 8: SPF Records and DomainKeys

You are nearly there. This is a final optional step, but one that is recommended. SPF records and DomainKeys are some additional DNS records that will help stop people sending emails that purport to come from one of your email addresses.

Nothing more than some clever DNS work to get them set up.

Follow these instructions here:
Create an SPF Record
Create DomainKeys

Step 9: Email Forwarding

Knowing what you know about nicknames and groups, perhaps you don’t need forwarding.

Forwarding is used to collect email sent to a mailbox (e.g. joe@yourdomain.com) and forward it to another email address.

You set this up from your email inbox, using the Mail Settings link (from the gears icon at the top right of your mailbox).

Setting up email forwarding is a 3 part process:
Firstly you go to Mail Settings, Email Forwarding and enter the address you want to forward to
Secondly you need to go the email account being forwarded to and click a verification link that has been sent there
Thirdly you open up the original email account, go back to Mail Settings, Email Forwarding and now you can complete the set up of the forwarding.

If you don’t complete all 3 steps, the forwarding won’t take place.

Review and Test

Time to review and test out your setup. Send emails to each of your email addresses. Use your webmail to view your emails.

Test your Calendar and Docs accounts.

Super.

Step 10: Domain Aliases

Optional.

If you have yourdomain.com and also yourdomain.net, you can set up yourdomain.net as an alias of yourdomain.com in Google Apps. Once you do this, all of the email addresses that work for yourdomain.com will also work for yourdomain.net, and the emails sent to those addresses will end up your the appropriate yourdomain.com mailbox.

This is a nice touch if you have the extra domains. Keep in mind to complete this you’ll need to follow the DNS instructions to set up an A record. By now you’re a DNS expert, so enjoy.

Reading your Email

You can read your Google Mail using any web browser. The Google Mail web interface is fast and convenient, and works on your iPhone and iPad as well.

And … you can use a mail application (such as Outlook or Apple Mail) that reads POP or IMAP mailboxes as well.

If you know how to set up POP and IMAP readers, you’ll have no trouble following Google’s help articles.

If you haven’t … consider using the web interface and see if that works well for you.

Otherwise, go into Mail Settings and find the POP/IMAP settings. Activate POP or IMAP (and you might need to read Google’s articles to help you decide which you want to use – IMAP is more modern, but might not be the way you are used to reading email).

If you are using the web interface, here are a few suggestions:

• Use Settings, General to display 100 messages per page. Now you’ll be able to scan your email much faster, and file/delete message in bulk.
• Use Settings, Accounts to let you send email from several different accounts
• Use Settings, Web Clips to turn off messages above your inbox.

Spam filters and POP readers

Your Google Mail account filters spam at the mail server. Spam is NOT copied across to your mail reader. So you may need to login in to your webmail from time to time to check nothing important has been filtered.

Migrating Contact Lists and Old Mail

Useful article on how to Import Your Mail and Contacts

Tasks

Try Settings, Labs and turn on Tasks to get a handy to do list in your mail box: Google Tasks

Calendar

Google Apps gives you Mail and Calendar. You can click through to your calendar from your web mail box, or access it at http://calendar.yourdomain.com.

It is very handy. You can easily share calendars with other users in your domain. And the Quick Add link makes it very quick and easy to use.

The Google Apps Admin Help

If you get stuck using the Google Apps control panel to add users, create groups and so on, you can get detailed help at the Google Apps Admin Help Centre.

Special Offer: Google Apps plus a WordPress Website

You can get your Google Apps account (Standard or Business) set up for you by OM4, together with a WordPress business website hosted by OM4. You’ll have a professional business website together with business email that you can use to get out into the market with.