It used to be free to use a custom Google Workspace. At this point, you’re better of just using Fast Mail for email hosting and keeping it separate from Google.
I just tried to sign up for Fastmail actually, and … they apparently don’t support custom international domains. That’s more or less fine for people who live in and were born in the US and UK but might be a problem if you’re literally any other demographic, I’m disappointed.
Both the domains we are using with Fastmail are european ccTLDs (not .uk!) so I am not sure what you mean by “don’t support”. Their original domain was fastmail.fm and they are an Australian company.
Any chance @mort might be referring to Unicode vs. punycode rather than TLDs? I had no trouble using an .xyz in Fastmail when I set it up two days ago; granted, that’s a gTLD rather than a ccTLD and I set it up after I set up my .com.
Have you reached out to their support? Maybe they can add that. I have been a happy customer for many years and I would be surprised if they flat out reject it
Apparently their workaround is to manually enter the punycode domain. Would be kinda difficult to avoid supporting that I guess, but no part of their interface seems to have any understanding of or support for IDNs.
It is a workaround. If Fastmail supported IDNs, that would mean letting the user type in the IDN and not have deal with the punycode. It’s nice that IDNs are just specially encoded ASCII domains behind the scenes so that they can be made to work with legacy software which doesn’t support IDNs, but it’s sad that Fastmail is such legacy software.
If I understand this and all the comments well, it is all about people:
wanting to use Gmail at all costs.
not wanting to pay for Google Workspace
Right?
This seems really odd…
I mean, at some point, you should really consider either paying for the stuff or questioning your dependency to Google. There are myriad of very cool mail providers allowing you to use custom domains. Some are cheap. Some are expensive (but, I admit that even Protonmail is cheaper than Google Workspace those days).
That’s not the whole story. Google Workspace is really “heavyweight.” If you sign up for an account for a separate Google Workspace account for each domain you own, and you own a handful of domains, you end up with a separate Google Workspace (which means a separate Google Drive, a separate GMail, a separate Admin Console, etc. etc.) for each account.
The Googley solution to this complexity spiral is their system for “primary domains and user alias domains”, but this requires that you accept a very specific set of tradeoffs. Namely, that every single alias domain is identical to the primary domain in terms of user accounts, so every userN@domain1 also exists as a valid userN@domain2. You also can only send email “from” the primary domain with the full support, as the user alias domains are meant to be for incoming mail only. (It turns out there is a way to send mail from a user alias domain, but it requires some manual setup and another set of tradeoffs.)
If you instead use their “secondary domain” feature, you turn your Google Workspace into a bit of a mess and also incur per-seat monthly charges for every user-domain combination.
So it’s not just about money – it’s about simplicity, too. But yes, Google Workspace also makes things expensive.
“ you end up with a separate Google Workspace for each account”
Not true. I’ve handled a family 3 handles account with 7 domains for years until very recently (switched the family to Proton this year). All the domains were, obviously, handled gracefully. With 2 users using one as their primary and the other using another as his primary (others being used as redirections).
“You also can only send email “from” the primary domain with the full support, as the user alias domains are meant to be for incoming mail only.”
False. Without any specific tradeoff or config.
“ incur per-seat monthly charges for every user-domain combination.”
False. It is a per user charge.
Let’s be clear: I find the Google Workspace admin really clumsy. I hate it. (god bless the protonmail admin interface, which is a lot leaner). I also hate Google. And it is expensive.
But I fail to see how setting up external unreliable services with gross hack like explained in the post is easier than just going to the Google admin interface.
If you like Google so much, just pay them. Else, just go elsewhere. But how could messing with old those stuff about simplicity?
That sounds like it might be primary+secondary domains, not one primary domain + user alias domains.
In which case it is a per-seat license for each user-domain combination (or, more specifically, each login; see the caveat about aliases within this setup below*).
When you use a single domain with only alias domains, you can only log in with the primary domain. I admit that I never personally used primary + secondary domains because of the mess that creates in terms of having user accounts at different domains intermingled in the same Google Workspace account. Which breaks the expectations of some external tools, especially if you use Google as an auth provider.
(* But, I think you’re right that if you use primary+secondary domains, you are also allowed to use other domains as aliases for the login domain. I forgot about that. So you don’t have to pay for every combination.)
Many email and DNS providers offer forwarding nowadays, even for free. However, relying only on forwarding to get messages to Gmail can and will lose messages in transit. This is due to Gmail’s spam filtering, which can at any point decide to reject forwarded messages. Such messages are then either bounced, dropped silently or must be checked via forwarder’s service.
[…] forwarding alone is not enough for reliable Gmail delivery. Forwarded messages will often be rejected, and unless there is a fallback, messages would get lost.
On the other hand, delivering messages to Gmail is only one part of the setup. Forwarders rarely offer outgoing relays for sending message from within Gmail for your domain.
[…] you can configure Gmail to use its own relays for sending messages [as sdubinsky’s article describes]. […] This may sound tempting, but if you care about your messages reaching the destination, it is better to avoid such hacks. Messages sent that way through Gmail will not carry a DKIM signature, which is however very important for instance for deliveries to other Gmail accounts.
Evaluating these claims against my experiences
I have been using the same setup as sdubinsky for over a decade. I do remember one occasion in the last month when Gmail rejected legitimate emails that were forwarded from my domain. Those emails were one-time access codes from Steam when I was trying to log in on an additional computer. It sounds like Gmailify would have fixed this.
I remember at least three other times I failed to receive messages, most recently account creation confirmation emails from Fanatical in November 2022. Those failures were due to my domain’s mail server not even forwarding the messages to my Gmail address because the mail server considered them spam. I remember that when trying to receive Fanatical’s emails, I had tried to whitelist Fanatical’s domain in some cPanel configuration screen that had seemed to work before, but my mail server considered its Apache SpamAssassin scores to trump that configuration, still refusing to forward the messages in order to protect its sender reputation. (My mail server is shared with other users of the cheap hosting service I use, so it is not under my full control.)
Gmailify would fix this type of problem because its spam filtering only edits the subject rather than dropping messages entirely. I could also fix this by switching to another mail forwarding provider with a spam filter that is more accurate, that never drops messages entirely, or that allows user configuration to override its spam detection. (When I had this problem with Fanatical, I worked around the underlying problem by grudgingly giving Fanatical my underlying Gmail address, then changing my Fanatical account’s email address after I no longer needed to receive verification emails.)
I do not, however, remember any instance when an email I sent within Gmail to another Gmail address was rejected due to not having a DKIM signature for my custom domain. Perhaps recipients of my emails see a lack of a checkmark in Gmail’s UI next to my email’s From address, but if so, nobody has cared enough to mention it to me.
I don’t use gmail personally, and am not invested in using gmai or Gmailify or whateverl, but all the big providers are going to start requiring DKIM signatures pass, I don’t remember when exactly they are all transitioning(and too lazy to look up the latest deadlines), but your past history won’t matter if they eventually start bouncing all non-DKIM signed mails, which is very likely in the near-ish future. Will it be 2024 or 2025, I dunno but I’m betting they will enforce it as soon as they think they can get away with it.
Per Gmail Help – Email sender guidelines, “Starting February 1, 2024, all senders who send email to Gmail accounts must […] Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain.” That will be a problem if I don’t change my email setup. Thank you for the warning.
This will be much less useful in 3 weeks when GMail removes the basic HTML interface (more information-dense, loads faster, less distracting and hostile). I am at least partly thankful for it as an impetus to finally stop using GMail even for junk emails.
But, there are issues. Some are those described by others, like occasional rejected incoming mails and occasional rejected outgoing mails. So, when it’s an email address I really care about, that is, one associated with a business or online identity, I opt for a paid upgrade. The two options that work for me, after exhausting many other options through research, are: (1) Google Workspace – where you control Google’s email server for your custom domain via their Workspace Admin Console or, (2) switch that address to Fastmail.
Fastmail especially helps when the Google Workspace upgrade is too costly or overkill, which is usually the case for only a single user. An interesting thing about Fastmail is that if you do the common pattern of username@domain where the username stays static but there are multiple domains, Fastmail can handle that well with only a single “Standard” user account, which is $50/year. The big downside to Fastmail when you are all-in on GMail is that for the best experience, you have to use their interface on web/mobile rather than GMail’s.
It used to be free to use a custom Google Workspace. At this point, you’re better of just using Fast Mail for email hosting and keeping it separate from Google.
I just tried to sign up for Fastmail actually, and … they apparently don’t support custom international domains. That’s more or less fine for people who live in and were born in the US and UK but might be a problem if you’re literally any other demographic, I’m disappointed.
Both the domains we are using with Fastmail are european ccTLDs (not .uk!) so I am not sure what you mean by “don’t support”. Their original domain was fastmail.fm and they are an Australian company.
Any chance @mort might be referring to Unicode vs. punycode rather than TLDs? I had no trouble using an .xyz in Fastmail when I set it up two days ago; granted, that’s a gTLD rather than a ccTLD and I set it up after I set up my .com.
@snazz is right, I’m talking about IDNs, aka non-ASCII characters in the name.
Have you reached out to their support? Maybe they can add that. I have been a happy customer for many years and I would be surprised if they flat out reject it
Apparently their workaround is to manually enter the punycode domain. Would be kinda difficult to avoid supporting that I guess, but no part of their interface seems to have any understanding of or support for IDNs.
You should always use punycode, without exception, in every circumstance. IDNs are just a display-level thing.
That’s literally exactly what I said their workaround is, yes
And what I am saying is that this is not a workaround.
There isn’t any scenario where you wouldn’t use punycode. Not for Fastmail, not for anything.
It is a workaround. If Fastmail supported IDNs, that would mean letting the user type in the IDN and not have deal with the punycode. It’s nice that IDNs are just specially encoded ASCII domains behind the scenes so that they can be made to work with legacy software which doesn’t support IDNs, but it’s sad that Fastmail is such legacy software.
I am using an IDN with Fastmail just fine.
When I tried to enter my custom domain while signing up it just told me to “enter a domain” if I had entered a domain with an “ø” in it
Just use its punycode encoding.
Yeah, that’s the workaround you have to do to account for the fact that Fastmail doesn’t support IDNs.
If I understand this and all the comments well, it is all about people:
Right?
This seems really odd…
I mean, at some point, you should really consider either paying for the stuff or questioning your dependency to Google. There are myriad of very cool mail providers allowing you to use custom domains. Some are cheap. Some are expensive (but, I admit that even Protonmail is cheaper than Google Workspace those days).
That’s not the whole story. Google Workspace is really “heavyweight.” If you sign up for an account for a separate Google Workspace account for each domain you own, and you own a handful of domains, you end up with a separate Google Workspace (which means a separate Google Drive, a separate GMail, a separate Admin Console, etc. etc.) for each account.
The Googley solution to this complexity spiral is their system for “primary domains and user alias domains”, but this requires that you accept a very specific set of tradeoffs. Namely, that every single alias domain is identical to the primary domain in terms of user accounts, so every
userN@domain1also exists as a validuserN@domain2. You also can only send email “from” the primary domain with the full support, as the user alias domains are meant to be for incoming mail only. (It turns out there is a way to send mail from a user alias domain, but it requires some manual setup and another set of tradeoffs.)If you instead use their “secondary domain” feature, you turn your Google Workspace into a bit of a mess and also incur per-seat monthly charges for every user-domain combination.
So it’s not just about money – it’s about simplicity, too. But yes, Google Workspace also makes things expensive.
“ you end up with a separate Google Workspace for each account”
Not true. I’ve handled a family 3 handles account with 7 domains for years until very recently (switched the family to Proton this year). All the domains were, obviously, handled gracefully. With 2 users using one as their primary and the other using another as his primary (others being used as redirections).
“You also can only send email “from” the primary domain with the full support, as the user alias domains are meant to be for incoming mail only.”
False. Without any specific tradeoff or config.
“ incur per-seat monthly charges for every user-domain combination.”
False. It is a per user charge.
Let’s be clear: I find the Google Workspace admin really clumsy. I hate it. (god bless the protonmail admin interface, which is a lot leaner). I also hate Google. And it is expensive.
But I fail to see how setting up external unreliable services with gross hack like explained in the post is easier than just going to the Google admin interface.
If you like Google so much, just pay them. Else, just go elsewhere. But how could messing with old those stuff about simplicity?
So what did you do? You set up one domain as primary and the other 6 as aliases?
Yes. But each user could choose his primary domain.
So alice could log in with alice@firstdomain and bob with bob@seconddom.
I admit that there’s a limitation:
alice@seconddom will be an alias of alice@firstdomain
bob@firstdomain will be an alias of bob@seconddom
But for small organizations (which is what is covered in this article), this makes plenty of sense.
That sounds like it might be primary+secondary domains, not one primary domain + user alias domains.
In which case it is a per-seat license for each user-domain combination (or, more specifically, each login; see the caveat about aliases within this setup below*).
When you use a single domain with only alias domains, you can only log in with the primary domain. I admit that I never personally used primary + secondary domains because of the mess that creates in terms of having user accounts at different domains intermingled in the same Google Workspace account. Which breaks the expectations of some external tools, especially if you use Google as an auth provider.
(* But, I think you’re right that if you use primary+secondary domains, you are also allowed to use other domains as aliases for the login domain. I forgot about that. So you don’t have to pay for every combination.)
See also Gmailify for a reliable solution.
https://www.gmailify.com/
These parts of Gmailify’s docs explain how their $7/year service is different from sdubinsky’s solution:
1.1 Why Gmailify
1.6 Compared to other forwarders
Evaluating these claims against my experiencesI have been using the same setup as sdubinsky for over a decade. I do remember one occasion in the last month when Gmail rejected legitimate emails that were forwarded from my domain. Those emails were one-time access codes from Steam when I was trying to log in on an additional computer. It sounds like Gmailify would have fixed this.
I remember at least three other times I failed to receive messages, most recently account creation confirmation emails from Fanatical in November 2022. Those failures were due to my domain’s mail server not even forwarding the messages to my Gmail address because the mail server considered them spam. I remember that when trying to receive Fanatical’s emails, I had tried to whitelist Fanatical’s domain in some cPanel configuration screen that had seemed to work before, but my mail server considered its Apache SpamAssassin scores to trump that configuration, still refusing to forward the messages in order to protect its sender reputation. (My mail server is shared with other users of the cheap hosting service I use, so it is not under my full control.)
Gmailify would fix this type of problem because its spam filtering only edits the subject rather than dropping messages entirely. I could also fix this by switching to another mail forwarding provider with a spam filter that is more accurate, that never drops messages entirely, or that allows user configuration to override its spam detection. (When I had this problem with Fanatical, I worked around the underlying problem by grudgingly giving Fanatical my underlying Gmail address, then changing my Fanatical account’s email address after I no longer needed to receive verification emails.)
I do not, however, remember any instance when an email I sent within Gmail to another Gmail address was rejected due to not having a DKIM signature for my custom domain. Perhaps recipients of my emails see a lack of a checkmark in Gmail’s UI next to my email’s From address, but if so, nobody has cared enough to mention it to me.
I don’t use gmail personally, and am not invested in using gmai or Gmailify or whateverl, but all the big providers are going to start requiring DKIM signatures pass, I don’t remember when exactly they are all transitioning(and too lazy to look up the latest deadlines), but your past history won’t matter if they eventually start bouncing all non-DKIM signed mails, which is very likely in the near-ish future. Will it be 2024 or 2025, I dunno but I’m betting they will enforce it as soon as they think they can get away with it.
Per Gmail Help – Email sender guidelines, “Starting February 1, 2024, all senders who send email to Gmail accounts must […] Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain.” That will be a problem if I don’t change my email setup. Thank you for the warning.
You are welcome.
This will be much less useful in 3 weeks when GMail removes the basic HTML interface (more information-dense, loads faster, less distracting and hostile). I am at least partly thankful for it as an impetus to finally stop using GMail even for junk emails.
I do this for a few of my email addresses.
But, there are issues. Some are those described by others, like occasional rejected incoming mails and occasional rejected outgoing mails. So, when it’s an email address I really care about, that is, one associated with a business or online identity, I opt for a paid upgrade. The two options that work for me, after exhausting many other options through research, are: (1) Google Workspace – where you control Google’s email server for your custom domain via their Workspace Admin Console or, (2) switch that address to Fastmail.
Fastmail especially helps when the Google Workspace upgrade is too costly or overkill, which is usually the case for only a single user. An interesting thing about Fastmail is that if you do the common pattern of
username@domainwhere theusernamestays static but there are multiple domains, Fastmail can handle that well with only a single “Standard” user account, which is $50/year. The big downside to Fastmail when you are all-in on GMail is that for the best experience, you have to use their interface on web/mobile rather than GMail’s.Is it really completely unproblematic to send e-mail via Google’s SMTP server with a non-Google address as sender?
I’ve been doing it for years with several accounts, and never had a hint of an issue.
Also no issues to report, having done it with one Gmail account and multiple alias From addresses for over a decade.