GoDaddy Domain to Google Apps to Email Bliss

So I am seri­ously con­sid­er­ing now renew­ing my MobileMe/.Mac account when it comes up in 9 months. This is — indeed — quite a bit of type-a over-planning-in-advance, I real­ize, but please bear with me here: I need to get my saved IMAP fold­ers off MobileMe now! I want it on my GoDaddy account now because I get free email there with my host­ing and domain plans! My f-ing domain is there man … I want my username@mac.com saved mes­sages moved — now.

See there? Just had a mas­sive type-a attack — right there, lit­er­ally via my fin­ger­tips thru the key­board out over the Inter­nets and to your inter­net con­nec­tion to your high-speed modem (prob­a­bly) then to a router (still — most have one, nut I real­ize I am now lim­it­ing my audi­ence, yes, how­ever if you are a red­neck on dial-up — still — ? You won’t ever read my blog any­how. I didn’t code it for you bro — you are lit­er­ally learn­ing e-Bay at this very moment, try­ing des­per­ately to fig­ure out why it takes so very long to load-up every image) .. [where was I? Oh yeah!], to your com­puter, up its cir­cuitry (not min­i­miz­ing the audi­ence now tho am I?), to your dis­play and INTO YOUR EYES.

Yes, you felt, just now, quite deeply; a type-a attack. But I digress: I want my saved mail moved! So I’m fol­low­ing the arti­cle below — now. Well actu­ally — fu%k — I bet Godaddy has timed my ses­sion out by now and all because of my damned type-a fin­ger­tips to eyes rou­tine.

From: Mike’s Tech Blog » Blog Archive » Using IMAP with GoDaddy email accounts

Using IMAP with GoDaddy email accounts

I really enjoy using GoDaddy for my domain and host­ing provider. How­ever, there has always been one aspect of their ser­vices that gets on my nerves: email. Let me count the ways:

1. Their email ser­vices limit SMTP for­ward­ing to 250 times per day (that is how many emails you can send each day.)
2. Each mail­box only can store up to 10 MB, unless you pay extra.
3. You can­not use IMAP with their accounts, only POP3 or the website-based email.

For­tu­nately, I found out today how over­come all of these prob­lems in one felled swoop. To sum­ma­rize the process, you use Google Apps instead of the GoDaddy email sys­tem. GoDaddy lets you set all the nitty-gritty details of your account set­tings, includ­ing how your email is han­dled. There is a nice tuto­r­ial how to do this here: http://eric.forsbergville.com/AK

Or, if you don’t want to fol­low the instruc­tions at the site above, then you just cre­ate a Google Apps account at http://eric.forsbergville.com/uh , enter your domain name, go to the “Dash­board” page, click on the “Acti­vate email” link, and fol­low the directions.

Another great rea­son to do this is because now you’ll have all the ben­e­fits of hav­ing a Gmail account, but with your own domain’s email addresses instead of @gmail.com addresses. I have never owned a Gmail account, and I still don’t. Yet I use many of Google’s online appli­ca­tions: the search tool on my web­site, my per­sonal cal­en­dar, and now to main­tain my domain-specific email addresses. And yes, that means that I now get the same amount of email stor­age space for each account as some­one a Gmail account gets (over 6 GB at the time of writ­ing this), unlim­ited SMTP for­ward­ing, and IMAP access via my email client (I use Mozilla Thun­der­bird.) And all of this is for free! Who would’ve thought such a thing would be so read­ily avail­able to the pub­lic?
Kudos to Google! They may be get­ting mas­sive and over-controlling of many things, but there are still treat­ing their cus­tomers well.