I’m using Godaddy as a hosting provider. Goddady is cheap enough and I’m satisfied by the hosting services they offer. When the email services they offer are brought in discussion, they simply sucks. I saw many complaints on the web regarding this so I was hesitating to use their services. I also like gmail and I’d like to gather more emails to the same address.

I didn’t find any solution to use the Gmail server to get the mail directly there. I also didn’t like the option to forward the mail because I read that Godaddy email server doesn’t forward the emails in a very reliable way.

I found Google Apps which is a suite including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar and Google Docs to be used by different organizations, business and schools for sharing resources. You can use Google Apps for free or you can pay to get more features. You can check those features here.

All you have to do is to create a Google Apps account and to change domain settings in the Godaddy administration account. You don’t even need a hosting for this.

1. Apply for a Google Apps account here for the domain you own specific domain. After you create the account you need to show you are the administrator of the domain. For this you have to upload an html file containing a code in your domain. After you create and activate the account you have to activate the email. It will take some time to propagate all the changes, for me it took about 1-2 hours.

2. Meanwhile you have to change the domain emailing details. You have to login to Godaddy account and open the domain. The delete the existing MX data and add the new data that google provides. All the steps are described in google help. The help can be found at this address: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yourdomain.com/SetupMXInstructions. (put your domain name for which you applied instead of yourdomain.com).

At this link you can find a tutorial describing exactly the steps you have to follow to use the Google mail server to handle an email addresses.

Starting from now you can send/receive mails from the domain you added to your account. For example you can start using the-addreess@yourdomain.com