Domains4less email forwarding

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bazzer

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#173227 15-May-2015 14:47

I finally got around to registering a domain I liked (with domains4less) for my personal email. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to the whole thing, but for the time being all I really want is to have some emails forwarded to my gmail accounts.

This is what I've done so far:

From the basic "Set Parking or Forwarding" page, I turned off the free parking page (don't need it, it was giving me an Under Construction page anyway, what's it meant to look like?)
Set up four email forwards (admin, me, wife, catch-all wildcard) to various gmail accounts
On the "Point to Hosting" page, name servers set to "Default (parking, email forwarding and web redirects)" (i.e. ns1|2|3.nameserver.net.nz)
Nothing on "Use Free Services" 3rd party services

I looked at setting up Zoho mail (to allow me send from my domain email through gmail) and that required me to setup a CNAME record to verify my domain. So I went into the advanced control panel and created a domain template (I have no idea what these do!) and added the required record and applied it to my domain. That seemed to work fine and I've got Zoho set up. Because I didn't really know what it did, I set the Template back to "System: Default (Windows)", it might have been "System: Default (Linux PHP5.3) (New)".

I noticed that domains4less have a spam filter, I don't know if they apply it to forwarded mail but if so I don't think I need it as I'll be using gmail and that's fine for me. So, I wanted to disable spam filtering entirely. I did this by editing each forward in the advanced control panel and selecting "Disable Inbound Spam Protection". I had an odd issue where the individual forwards appeared to have a threshold of 0 (and I gather lower is more filtering?). I believe they just delete spam so this may be pertinent, so I've since switched them back to "Use domain spam settings" and changed the domain setting to "Disable Inbound Spam Protection" and the Threshold automatically moves to 999.

OK, so for those still following, thank you! I have a few questions:

Does it sound like I have everything set up OK? For example, should I stick with using global spam settings (Threshold 6.0) or is it OK to disable it to use gmail's and have I done that right? Because...
I am not receiving forwarded emails to my gmail account from a number of locations, e.g. my wife's work, my outlook.com account etc. What could be the reason for this? I am getting emails from a number of other locations, e.g. my work, gmail. Could it be the spam settings? Or something else? Outlook.com seems to be working OK now, so either the spam change worked, or something else? Propagation delay?
Any nice DNS references people can point me to? I don't think I'll need to worry about MX/A/CNAME records for a while, but I'd like to know about them. For example, I read something about adding TXT spf1 records but I don't know if they're applicable in my situation?

Thanks again!

timmmay

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#1305874 15-May-2015 14:52

What are you trying to achieve? Just hosting your personal email? Forwarding isn't relevant. The best way is to get a hosted email service, in which case you just point your MX records at the service (gmail, fastmail, etc). Hosting email on cheap shared hosting generally ends badly, your server/email ends up on spam lists so your emails don't arrive, you get a lot of spam and the filtering is rubbish, etc. I do a LOT of this type of work for people all over the world.

If you PM me your domain name I can have a look at the public records of what you've done.

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bazzer

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#1305891 15-May-2015 15:32

timmmay: What are you trying to achieve? Just hosting your personal email? Forwarding isn't relevant. The best way is to get a hosted email service, in which case you just point your MX records at the service (gmail, fastmail, etc). Hosting email on cheap shared hosting generally ends badly, your server/email ends up on spam lists so your emails don't arrive, you get a lot of spam and the filtering is rubbish, etc. I do a LOT of this type of work for people all over the world.

If you PM me your domain name I can have a look at the public records of what you've done.

I want to use gmail (Inbox), but I don't want to use Google Apps (for a few reasons but mainly, free is better!). So, my solution was to:

Use email forwarding from domains4less to forward any blah@domain.com emails to the relevant gmail account (this seems to be working fine now)
To enable sending via Zoho I needed to create accounts there (that I'm really not using) and use its SMTP in gmail (this also seems to be working - the tricky part was verifying with the CNAME record which I didn't understand but seems to have gone OK)

I am open to learning how I could do this better, so please feel free to comment. I'll PM you my details.

timmmay

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#1305921 15-May-2015 15:58

Really, really don't forward email. Just set up the domain on your mail host and point the MX records at the host. It's really super easy, I've got a side business that does things that include this, I've moved a dozen people between email servers in the past few months alone.

It sounds like you've made a bit of a tangled mess to be honest, but it should be easy to untangle. Zoho can host your domain email. Use this guide.

nicmair

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#1305923 15-May-2015 16:02

Watch this approach with Domains4less as I attempted to do a very similar thing, which for a while worked fine, but then I started to find that some emails never arrived are the redirected destination, including some pretty important ones like trademe…. Domains4less was never able to resolve the issues so I had to finally had to go away from a redirect and take a full mail service (including the cost!!!), it has never missed a beat since and works great. I finally moved away from the original email address and now just have the one registered with domains4less so life is much eaiser…

timmmay

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#1305925 15-May-2015 16:05

The problem Nic said are why I'm saying do it properly, not hashed together.

I use www.FastMail.com instead of Gmail, it's cheaper and very reliable. Office 365 is another option. Remember you need one account per user, not per email address/domain, with most email setups anyway. Well, if you want to reply with the correct "from" address you might need one address per domain email, but if they're just for receive it's easier.

This stuff is all really quite easy, at least once you understand it.

bazzer

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#1305946 15-May-2015 16:25

timmmay: Really, really don't forward email. Just set up the domain on your mail host and point the MX records at the host. It's really super easy, I've got a side business that does things that include this, I've moved a dozen people between email servers in the past few months alone.

It sounds like you've made a bit of a tangled mess to be honest, but it should be easy to untangle. Zoho can host your domain email. Use this guide.

Maybe I've done a bad job of explaining. I basically followed that guide but rather than point the MX records to Zoho (which I understand will direct my inbound mail there) I've left them pointing to domain4less' default (allowing me to use their email forwarding, including catch-all). Outbound mail does go through Zoho authenticated SMTP, the same as if I were using any old email client, so don't see a problem there?

I guess I also don't see the problem with email forwarding directly to gmail? Happy to hear what they are though. I guess I figured that all (most) domain hosts offer email forwarding for a reason. Is it really that bad? It's for personal use, not business so I'm not really interested in spending $100s of dollars a year in hosting. If I was happy to use Zoho Mail I would do as you suggest, but I want to use gmail and I don't want to pay $50 per email for the privilege.

I guess my initial post sounded a bit confused because there are quite a lot of options and I don't know what they all do. I have mostly left those options alone though. Was there anything unexpected in the DNS records?

bazzer

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#1305948 15-May-2015 16:28

timmmay: The problem Nic said are why I'm saying do it properly, not hashed together.

I use www.FastMail.com instead of Gmail, it's cheaper and very reliable. Office 365 is another option. Remember you need one account per user, not per email address/domain, with most email setups anyway. Well, if you want to reply with the correct "from" address you might need one address per domain email, but if they're just for receive it's easier.

This stuff is all really quite easy, at least once you understand it.

Taken on board. I guess that's what I'm trying to do. Understand it, rather than just blindly follow a knowledgeable person's instructions! :)

timmmay

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#1305954 15-May-2015 16:37

Don't use forwarding from names4less to zoho. Point mail directly at Zoho. You're opening yourself to a world of trouble, weird behavior, spam issues.

If you want it forwarded from your mail server to gmail for convenience, sure, but once you're using an email program on a phone/PC it makes no difference what website it's hosted on anyway.

Email is really simple, one of the earliest services on the net. Point your MX records at a mail server. Doing it another way without fairly extensive knowledge of how email works and experience in the area is in my opinion a folly.

grant_k

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#1305992 15-May-2015 17:35

I ran into similar problems trying to forward emails from my personal domain to Gmail. My wife gets a lot of spam and periodically Gmail would reject some of it, causing Zoho's forwarding to be disabled. Then I had to log into her Zoho webmail account and manually forward all the missed messages, before re-enabling forwarding, which worked again for a while before crapping out again...

Very annoying to say the least!

After a bit of experimenting I found the solution was to set up Gmail to fetch email from Zoho using POP3. It has worked reliably for a couple of years now with no more missing messages.

timmmay

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#1306025 15-May-2015 18:16

Instead of forwarding to gmail how about setting up IMAP for each account on your wifes phone/computer? I know, wives, but they can be somewhat influenced in the area of technology.

grant_k

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#1306058 15-May-2015 18:36

timmmay: Instead of forwarding to gmail how about setting up IMAP for each account on your wifes phone/computer? I know, wives, but they can be somewhat influenced in the area of technology.

Thanks for the suggestion Tim, but I've left her on POP3 for a very good reason. She only has one device which receives email and that's her laptop. Doesn't want to know about a smart phone.

I use Thunderbird together with Gmail's IMAP on my desktop PC and it works OK most of the time. But every now and again, it gets out of sync until you 'Compact Folders', and I sometimes have to restart. Whereas Thunderbird and Gmail's POP3 run like clockwork, year in and year out. The simpler I can keep things on my wife's PC the better!

By using Gmail to FETCH from Zoho rather than using Zoho to forward to Gmail, it has solved all the problems, except for a small delay, which doesn't matter at all in my wife's case.

timmmay

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#1306075 15-May-2015 18:58

POP3... wow. Welcome to the 90s. IMAP is much the same, but designed for email to live on the server. Gmail/IMAP in thunderbird works great on my PC. Agree Gmail pull from Zoho rather than forwarding.

I still think you're asking for trouble with your forwarding. Set up the MX records as every single guide says, rather than rolling your own.

Good luck... I have a feeling you're going to need it. I'm out.

grant_k

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#1306085 15-May-2015 19:22

timmmay: ...
I still think you're asking for trouble with your forwarding. Set up the MX records as every single guide says, rather than rolling your own.

Good luck... I have a feeling you're going to need it. I'm out.

I think we're talking at cross purposes here Tim. I have indeed set up the MX records for my domain to point directly at Zoho, rather than forwarding from the domain host.

It is the OP (Bazzer) who is forwarding from his/her domain host to Zoho. AFAIK, the domain host I use doesn't want anything to do with email, so that's why I chose Zoho.

timmmay

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#1306129 15-May-2015 20:51

To be fair, it's Friday night, and I've had a few drinks.