Lick My Design

After suffering more email problems from my main web hosting (my reseller server IP kept getting flagged as a spammer from hotmail!) I decided to look into alternative email hosting options.

The alternatives were to pay for a POP3 email account with a registrar (£14.27 p/a with 123-reg.co.uk), or create a free Google Apps account and create a gmail IMAP account for my domain. I created a working example of each of these options to weigh-up the benefits, but first let me cover the method of splitting email and web hosting.

Previously when creating a new site – I’d follow this process:

1. Order new domain, i.e: domainname.com with 123-reg.co.uk – when ready, change the name servers to point to my web hosting.
2. Add @ and www DNS entries records to point to my hosting IP.
3. Add 2 MX records: mail.domainname.com (10), mail.domainname.com (20)
4. Login to whm and create the new domain (along with a pop3 account)
5. Wait for the domain to propagate and show the generic hosting holding page (upto 24hrs)
6. Upload site content.
7. Setup the email account in Outlook, setting incoming and outgoing mail servers to: mail.domainname.com, check you can send and receive emails.
8. Done.

To use a separate POP3 account the process changes as follows:

1. Order a new domain, but leave the name servers pointing to the default 123-reg ones.
2. Add @ and www DNS entries records to point to my hosting IP.
3. Leave the default MX records: dns1.123-reg.co.uk (10), dns2.123-reg.co.uk (20)
4. Login to whm and create the new domain (no need to create email accounts)
5. Wait for the domain to propagate and show the generic hosting holding page (upto 24hrs)
6. Upload site content
7. Setup the email account in Outlook – set incoming mail server to: pop.123-reg.co.uk, outgoing to: smtp.123-reg.co.uk, also make sure the ‘My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication’ option is on (use same settings as incoming mail server).
8. Done.

A final easier option for a site that is already setup is to just change the mx records in cpanel to point to:

mx0.123-reg.co.uk. 10
mx1.123-reg.co.uk. 20

In my case I opted for a new (paid for) POP3 account as it proved easier to setup (read: communicate over the phone to the end client) – in this case just changing the incoming and outgoing mail server values and ensuring that the ‘My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication’ is ticked.

The alternative IMAP account whilst being free from Google – being an IMAP account it needed a few more options in setting up in Outlook and was slower when sending and receiving (as it had to sync folders etc from the remote). Another factor was that I already had an analytics google account setup using [email protected] and this couldn’t be used again under the Google Apps Gmail box.