# Email address connected to domain name



## 2steps (Jul 18, 2003)

I want to get an email address for the domain name I have and wondered if anyone could recommend a service. Where my site is hosted don't offer an email service and I don't want to change my sites host.

Many thanks


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

You could probably use a free service, like Gmail, and setup the DNS MX record for your domain to point to that free service. You'll need to find out which DNS is used for your domain so you can get the MX record setup properly.

Peace...


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## 2steps (Jul 18, 2003)

Thank you. How would I do that? Will the settings be in the email account or the account for where I bought my domain name?


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

First, you will need to find a mail hosting service you can use for your e-mail account(s). If you want to go with Gmail, read on Gmail's support of this. I know some businesses use Gmail as their mail server, with e-mail accounts in their respective domains. If you don't want to use Gmail, find another mail hosting service. Once you locate a mail hosting service you like, find out if they would need anything more than having the DNS MX record setup for them to serve as your mail server.

Additionally, you'll need to decide if you want web-based, POP3-based, or IMAP-based access to your e-mail. If you don't know what POP3 and IMAP are, learn about them online because you'll need to have a basic understanding of them.

Lastly, find out through your domain registrar which DNS is being used for your domain. If you are using the DNS provided by your website host, you'll need to contact your website host to get help with getting the MX record setup.

The DNS MX record is a DNS record which tells mail servers to which server to send e-mail.

If "DNS" and "MX record" are also foreign terms to you, you'll need a basic understanding of how DNS works as well.

So, for now do some research to learn about DNS, POP3, and IMAP and find a mail service that you can use to host your e-mail for your existing domain.

Peace...


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## 2steps (Jul 18, 2003)

Thank you and will do


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

Cool. As you make progress and have questions, post them and we'll answer them (hopefully).

I actually did something like this for a dentist's site I maintain. We had to move the site to another host, for SEO work, but I wanted to keep the e-mail where it was, on our original host.

So, I had our host make the following DNS change (logically, of course):

www ===> (ip address of SEO company server)
MX ===> mail.mydomain.com
mail.mydomain.com ===> IP address of original host

This way, any "www" traffic (www.mydomain.com) went to the SEO company's server and all e-mail stayed on our original server. Once that SEO company was fired, I changed the above to remove the "splitting of servers" and everything went back to a normal configuration.

The above might sound like a lot but once you have a basic understanding of the pieces of the puzzle and have the pieces in hand, it shouldn't be too hard to put them together the way you want. 

Peace...


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## pctechguru (May 6, 2012)

You may want to call a company like GoDaddy. They have reasonable prices and good customer service and will be able to take care of a lot of the DNS records stuff for you.


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## colinsp (Sep 5, 2007)

Use anyone other than Godaddy just do a Google search of webhost reviews and you will see why not to use them. There are plenty of other cheap hosts out there.


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## tomdkat (May 6, 2006)

I second not using GoDaddy. A friend of mine had a domain registered with them and ended up losing it since they wouldn't renew it for her. There's more to the story than what I wrote but the short version is, she ended up losing the domain.

Peace...


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