Connecting your domain hosted mail @ bluehost to your gmail account

Published December 2, 2013 6:38 pm

I have my own domain hosted on bluehost. I have not created personalized email address under our domain – thinking it will be tedious to manage another set of email accounts e.g. feedback@example.com or info@example.com and add to daily maintenance tasks. I have simply created an address on gmail and added forward rule to fwd the mails to my personal account @ gmail.

Few days back, I came to know from one of my friend that gmail allows to add “other” email accounts under your hosted domain like mentioned above, to your gmail account. That way you can manage multiple of your accounts – from one single dashboard – your personal gmail account. Today I decided to look into this and finished in order of 2 hours. In my case, the domain is hosted on bluehost.

bluehost itself give the sequences of steps. These steps are good and can be followed. In addition, following notes might help:

  1. Under settings in your gmail, you will find ‘accounts’ tab.
  2. For correct bluehost pop3/smtp server & port settings – refer here. I have used SSL settings for incoming pop3 and outgoing smtp.
  3. Update: I recently found that the above link is now broken. mail settings that works for me: incoming: mail.example.com, port 995, ssl; outgoing: mail.example.com, port 465, ssl; need  to replace your domain name in place of “example.com”
  4. Ensure that username is including the domain name; that is abc@example.com instead of just ‘abc’
  5. If correct settings are not used – you will get error “Server denied POP3 access for the given username and password”.
  6. I have checked ‘leave a copy of the retrieved message at the server’ for the time being. If left unchecked, message will be deleted from your webhost mailbox after retrieval.
  7. I have also checked ‘Label incoming messages’ options so that I can see all message from other account in one folder.
  8. Your gmail verification message might land up in your gmail account while you are checking in your hoster web mail client.
  9. Lastly – I wanted to ensure replying from my account @ mydomain.com for these messages. For this, steps from gmail help were useful.

It is also interesting to note that google provided google apps free edition for custom domain until dec 2012. Now, it costs USD 5 per user/month.