Do you want to take advantage of the virtually unlimited email storage (more than 2 Gigabytes) provided by Google mail (Gmail), but also want to have your own email address at your domain?  Just follow the instructions below!

For the following instructions, assume that you are Mr Joe Cool and you have your website www.imcool.com hosted with Yet Another Web Host.  Your email address is jcool@imcool.com.

This process can be broken down into 3 main steps, and one optional step

  1. Sign up for a gmail account if you don't already have one
  2. In your website control panel, configure your email to be forwarded to your gmail account
  3. Configure a new identity in gmail using your personal email at your domain (jcool@imcool.com)
  4. Optionally: import your existing contacts and existing email into gmail

Detailed instructions:


1. Sign up for a gmail account if you don't already have one.
  • Simply go to google and sign up for a new account.  Let's assume jcool was already chosen, so you had to use jcool395@gmail.com instead.

2. In your website control panel, configure your email to be forwarded to your gmail account.
  • Log into your control panel, accessible at http://www.imcool.com/cpanel
  • Go into the section for "mail", and then click on "forwarders"
  • Add a new forwarding rule for jcool@imcool.com to forward to your newly created gmail address of jcool395@gmail.com

3. Configure a new identity in gmail using your personal email at your domain (jcool@imcool.com). 
  • When you're logged into gmail, click "settings" in the top right hand corner. 
  • Click "Accounts", and then click "Add another email address". 
  • In the "email address" field, fill in your jcool@imcool.com address, and click "next step".  Gmail will now tell you that they will be sending a verification email to the address you've selected.  This will prevent people from trying to impersonate someone else.  Go ahead and click the "Send Verification" button, because if everything goes well, the email will be sent, and immediately forwarded back to your gmail inbox. 
  • Check your gmail inbox for the confirmation message
  • Click where it tells you to click, which will confirm that you are the owner of jcool@imcool.com
  • Now that you are confirmed, return to the gmail main screen and click "settings" again.
  • Inside "settings" click "accounts", and then toggle the radio button labeled "Reply from the same address the message was sent to"  With this setting, if someone mails you at your imcool.com address, when you reply back to them, your reply address will correctly read jcool@imcool.com, instead of your gmail address.  Note:  If you compose a new message in gmail, you will have the option of choosing which identity you want to use.  You can continue to use your gmail address for certain contacts, and use your imcool.com address for others, if you wish.
4. Optionally: import your existing contacts and existing email into gmail
  • For importing contacts, Google has a nice guide here
  • For importing existing email via POP into gmail, follow these instructions. This will be a one time process, since the forwarding rule is now in place and all future mail will be forwarded to gmail.  After you've verified the mail was successfully imported, you can delete that account from the "get mail from other accounts" section of the Account settings.  Note: this will only generally work for messages in the main inbox, so if you have messages in folders that you also wish to import, move these into the main inbox to be sure they get imported to gmail.  Or forward them individually directly to your gmail address.