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:

 

 

1. 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...
2. 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?
3. 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!