This help article will help you set up email for all the users at your web address (yourname@yoursite.com).
Before we walk you through this process, make sure you already have
purchased your website address and have all the information ready and available.
If you have not purchased a website address yet, do that first, and then come back to this article.
We're going to walk you through how to set up Google Apps for your email. Their service is great for a number of reasons:
- It offers the best spam protection on the web
- It is easy to set up and manage, even if you have lots of users
- It comes with TONS of storage space
- It lets you easily check your mail on the web, while syncing with Mac Mail, Microsoft Outlook, mobile phone email, etc
- It's free for non-profits, schools and for everyone else up to 10 users
It's truly a revolutionary service. You can read more about it here.
Where to start:
If you're a non-profit organization, you can apply for a free Google Apps account here.
You'll need to wait for a response from Google and then follow the rest of this help article after that. (You also may want to check Google's eligibility requirements first, because sometimes they seem to be strict about their rules).
For everyone else, you'll start here to sign up for Google Apps.
Walkthrough for setting up your account:
1. Enter your domain name (web address) on the first page of the sign up process, and then fill out your contact info on the next page.
2. Set up your administrator account. This is who will have complete access to everything within your email
service (i.e. who will add new addresses, change preferences, etc.). Don't forget to write down your password!
3. You account is now active, and you should see the Google Apps setup wizard. Click the "Next" button to get past the intro page and then the first real step will be to verify that you actually own your domain. Click "Next" again to begin and it should show that the recommended method is something called a "meta tag". Clover has a special feature that makes this step really easy to do. Copy the meta tag code from Google Apps, and then open a new page and sign in to your Greenhouse Dashboard at Clover.
4. In the dashboard, go to "Site Settings" and then "Google Domain Verification". Paste the meta tag code from Google Apps into the box in the dashboard and click "Save Changes".
5. Clover will take care of everything automatically to place that code on your home page like Google requires. You can now go back to your Google Apps account and click the "Verify" button at the bottom of the page.
6. Goole will verify your meta tag immediately and then take you to the next step of of creating new users.
From this point on, you can follow the steps in the Google Apps setup wizard. The big picture is that you'll create a new user for each person you want to give an email address to. After creating users, you can probably accept all the rest of the defaults in each step of the setup process. (Just make sure you leave the "Gmail" option checked - otherwise none of your users will actually have email).
The very last thing you might want to do is to set your email up through whatever program you use on your
computer. If you use a Mac, you'll probably be using Mac Mail, and if you have a PC, you'll probably be
on Microsoft Outlook. Google offers a great help center that will walk you through how to receive your mail through any
program you use (and also on your phone). If you are interested in setting your email up through an external program, go
to this Google Help page.
Congrats! Your new email accounts should now be up and running through Google Apps! If you find yourself stuck anywhere in this process,
feel free to give us a call at 805-527-8900 and we'll help walk you through setting up this service.
