Fastmail

People often ask me what the best and cheapest way is to set up a custom domain email, not just your standard free google.com email. You can of course pay Google, but I’m not a big fan of their interface or snooping on your email to better advertise to you.

I personally use Fastmail. It’s professional, fast, reliable, and has a nice web interface. If you’re interested, my referral code for 10% off your first year is here:

https://ref.fm/u28299296

There used to be a few decent free options, but as Google has started charging, so have the others.

Use Outlook.com to host your Domain Email

I used to recommend using Google to host your personal domain email (e.g. you@yoursite.com). But since Google started “monetizing” their products, they now charge $50/year/account for the service, quite steep.

Now I recommend Outlook.com, which is still free and a very good service. You can signup here:
https://domains.live.com/Signup/SignupDomain.aspx

You need an existing outlook.com email account to set up the mail domain account. Just like any change in mail server, you need to update at your registrar your  MX records and your TXT record to prove that you own the domain.

Then you can reach your mail by going to:
http://mail.live.com

Spam Scam

This will be my last post. I’m retiring since I won “some huge amount of United States Dollars” in the lotto. How did I win when I’ve never played the lotto? It’s easily explained in this email I got today. I just need to send the Lieutenant General or General all my personal information. I literally can’t believe my luck.

I am Lieutenant General Peter A. Blay (Chief of the Defense Staff (Ghana). I am mailing you in respect, of the present development going on here in my country GHANA.

I decided to contact you, after much investigation which was carried out by the Bureau of National Investigation (BNI) and the Ghana Police Service, to make sure our country is free of these fraudulent activities,which is going on here in Africa and for our country to bear a good name.

The Airport Authority detected some trunk boxes after been scanned the authorities detected that the boxes contains funds on your name and email that has been tempered on, they were been smuggled into the country by foreign Personnel who were on transit from London.

These men were trying to enter the country with the trunk boxes, when the airport authority detected that these boxes contains, some huge amount of United State Dollars. After much investigation we found out that these men were among those men, spoiling the good name of Africa.

They opened up to us that, they actually work with a Lotto company before their dismissal and used the opportunity to perpetuate their crimes, they told us that the funds inside the boxes was won by you, but now they planned to turn back on you and decided to take the money all to themselves out of the country. We later found out on the investigation that was carried that, these men are truly members of a well established organization to act on their criminal activities.

As I write you this mail now, the three(3) men that were caught are now in the custody of the Ghana Police Service over here in our country Ghana,while we are trying to track the others left, because they have proved to us that they belong to one organization.

That is why we have to reach you by your mail address and name that was tagged the boxes, so we can make the arrangement on the transfer of the funds to your designation.

Your urgent response will be very much appreciated as soon as you have received this email.

Thank you for your kind attention, for us to make sure our beloved country Ghana, bears a good name.

Please in your reply include your
A: FULL NAMES
B: ADDRESS
C: DIRECT CONTACT PHONE NUMBER
D: SCANNED COPY OF YOUR INTERNATIONAL PASSPORT OR ANY RELEVANT IDENTIFICATION PASSPORT.

As this information will be required, by the authorities in Ghana to draft the new change of ownership in your name as the rightful owner of the funds in our custody and also to verify the information given to us because the documentations covering the boxes have been tampered on.

Regards,
General Peter A. Blay

Use Google Email with your Domain

Google email works with name@gmail.com, but you could also use name@yourcompany.com. To do this, you sign up for Google Apps, which is offered in Standard (Free) and Premier Editions. Go to: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/

There are a couple of ways to do this:

The simplest is to choose “I want to buy a domain” which allows you to buy a domain through Google (which actually uses GoDaddy as the registrar and costs $10/month), which provides you a domain pre-configured to use Google services.

The other method is to use your existing domain or purchase from domain registrar service and assign the MX records to Google. Your DNS Manager or Domain Manager page from your registrar would then look like this:

The second method requires that you also verify that you own the domain by updating the cname record or uploading a file to the domain.

After pointing your MX records to Google, you can get your email by going to:

https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname.com
..where yourdomainname.com is actually your domain name.

Because that’s a long address, I typically set up a URL pointer so that mail.yourdomainname.com will point to the above address. This is also handled in the DNS management page at your domain registrar. The URL pointing would look like this:If your registrar’s DNS management system does not allow such a redirect, then you can set up a redirect from your website, for example from yourdomainname.com/mail/.

Thunderbird Add-ons

ThunderbirdYou might have heard about add-ons for the popular web browser Firefox that give it more capabilities. Well, the folks at Mozilla also make a great email client called Thunderbird (PC, Mac, Linux) that has add-ons too.

I found this out when I needed to send someone hundreds of emails. The Add-on ImportExportTools (which oddly is not part of Thurderbird’s list of Add-ons) was able to take all the emails I wanted and move them into an HTML indexed folder for easy browsing. This powerful add-on also helps in a myriad of cases when migrating or merging email archives, and it performs some import/export feats that are impossible with other email clients such as Outlook and Mac Mail.

ImportExportTools Thunderbird Add-on