Mx records for a cheap domain
December 27, 2011 4:58 PM Subscribe
Tell me everything I need to know about Mx records, Google Apps for Education, and our server.
I'm working as a teacher in a small school that is looking for some email options. Currently, we have email on our charter school's server that is not connected to our domain. Our domain is housed on one of those typical $9.99 hosts, think godaddy.com or the like. We do have Google Apps for Education and I'm trying to establish the email ability on Google Apps. In order to do this I need to change the mx records on the server. Unfortunately, I'm not the one with access to the domain and I'm trying to relay information to someone else who also doesn't quite understand what they are doing. Before I get much farther in the setup, I'm trying to determine answers to the following questions:
If our domain isn't currently hosting emails does it even have mx records to change?
Does Google Apps for Education program's emails still get stored on Google servers?
What downfalls are there from an IT setup? ie What am I not thinking of asking?
Yes, I do have an IT person that I could talk to, but they are contracted outside of our company. It is my job to research the best scenario before resorting to contracted services.
Yes, I have read previous questions, but I haven't seen anything that addresses people who haven't already created their own email within their domain. I'm also looking for an updated perspective on the program.
I'm working as a teacher in a small school that is looking for some email options. Currently, we have email on our charter school's server that is not connected to our domain. Our domain is housed on one of those typical $9.99 hosts, think godaddy.com or the like. We do have Google Apps for Education and I'm trying to establish the email ability on Google Apps. In order to do this I need to change the mx records on the server. Unfortunately, I'm not the one with access to the domain and I'm trying to relay information to someone else who also doesn't quite understand what they are doing. Before I get much farther in the setup, I'm trying to determine answers to the following questions:
If our domain isn't currently hosting emails does it even have mx records to change?
Does Google Apps for Education program's emails still get stored on Google servers?
What downfalls are there from an IT setup? ie What am I not thinking of asking?
Yes, I do have an IT person that I could talk to, but they are contracted outside of our company. It is my job to research the best scenario before resorting to contracted services.
Yes, I have read previous questions, but I haven't seen anything that addresses people who haven't already created their own email within their domain. I'm also looking for an updated perspective on the program.
Try this site. It is a Google Apps help site.
Google has a setup wizard that can walk you through this too. Whomever has the administrative access to Google Apps can find the wizard in the admin dashboard.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 5:21 PM on December 27, 2011
Google has a setup wizard that can walk you through this too. Whomever has the administrative access to Google Apps can find the wizard in the admin dashboard.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 5:21 PM on December 27, 2011
If our domain isn't currently hosting emails does it even have mx records to change?
Yes. If people can send email to you@yourschool.edu, there is an MX record somewhere that needs to be changed.
Does Google Apps for Education program's emails still get stored on Google servers?
Yup. However, if you're willing to pay, you can have local storage as well. I don't know the pricing, but it's generally very large institutions that do this.
What downfalls are there from an IT setup? ie What am I not thinking of asking?
People have mail in their inboxes right now. If that mail is stored on a server (i.e. not on a local PC), it will need to get transferred to the GApps servers, or it will be lost.
Someone (probably your IT person) needs to be responsible for creating all the needed usernames in GApps, if they don't exist already.
And then you've got to teach all of your users about the new system.
All of this migration work is fairly straightforward, but picky and detail oriented, so I suggest you consider getting someone to help you. There are consultants who specialize in that sort of thing.
Good luck!
posted by FfejL at 6:05 PM on December 27, 2011
Yes. If people can send email to you@yourschool.edu, there is an MX record somewhere that needs to be changed.
Does Google Apps for Education program's emails still get stored on Google servers?
Yup. However, if you're willing to pay, you can have local storage as well. I don't know the pricing, but it's generally very large institutions that do this.
What downfalls are there from an IT setup? ie What am I not thinking of asking?
People have mail in their inboxes right now. If that mail is stored on a server (i.e. not on a local PC), it will need to get transferred to the GApps servers, or it will be lost.
Someone (probably your IT person) needs to be responsible for creating all the needed usernames in GApps, if they don't exist already.
And then you've got to teach all of your users about the new system.
All of this migration work is fairly straightforward, but picky and detail oriented, so I suggest you consider getting someone to help you. There are consultants who specialize in that sort of thing.
Good luck!
posted by FfejL at 6:05 PM on December 27, 2011
Response by poster: Thanks for the help so far. This gives me a start in explaining how and why we might want to do this. To clarify on th email, we don't currently have email@ourschool.com. The email runs through a different domain/server setup and we aren't looking to migrate those at this time. Right now we are just hoping to setup student emails through the google Apps function.
posted by aetg at 6:29 AM on December 28, 2011
posted by aetg at 6:29 AM on December 28, 2011
If all you're doing is setting up a new domain, then it's super simple, and you can set it up quite quickly because you don't have to worry about if you're going to lose any email.
You need to find the person who has the keys required to update your DNS records, this is a hard person to find in some organisations, but usually it's the person who 'set up' the domain with your domain registrar.
You need to have these 5 MX records created. Web interfaces for updating records usually have fields like 'Record Type', 'Priority' and 'Domain name'. These are all 'MX', the number is the priority, and the name is the full name below. Include the trailing '.'.
1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
Once you've set those up in DNS, you can wait a while and then try sending email to an account set up on your domain. If you've got a problem, here's the troubleshooting guide: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33313 including a way to check that you've set up the records correctly.
posted by Jerub at 9:38 AM on December 29, 2011
You need to find the person who has the keys required to update your DNS records, this is a hard person to find in some organisations, but usually it's the person who 'set up' the domain with your domain registrar.
You need to have these 5 MX records created. Web interfaces for updating records usually have fields like 'Record Type', 'Priority' and 'Domain name'. These are all 'MX', the number is the priority, and the name is the full name below. Include the trailing '.'.
1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
Once you've set those up in DNS, you can wait a while and then try sending email to an account set up on your domain. If you've got a problem, here's the troubleshooting guide: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33313 including a way to check that you've set up the records correctly.
posted by Jerub at 9:38 AM on December 29, 2011
« Older What're the ethics of hiring a moonlighter who's... | Does 'Miranda and Steve' really ever work? Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
Conceivably. You'll need to do a whois to find out the controlling nameservers -- probably the current host -- and an MX lookup to check the domain's current MX record. Then log in with whoever's doing the DNS right now, see if there's the option for custom DNS, and if so, replace the existing MX records according to Google's instructions. (There are lots of specific examples for different hosts.) It's not that difficult a task.
The only obvious wrinkle would be how to migrate existing accounts, if you want to do that.
posted by holgate at 5:19 PM on December 27, 2011