If you have a custom domain and want to be able to send email through your personal Gmail account without having to register for a Business Gmail account then here’s how you can do it using Amazon’s SES.
Prerequisite
If you haven’t done so already you will need to set up your custom domain in Amazon’s SES. Here is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to create your email accounts using Amazon SES, Lambda and S3.
Once you’ve completed the steps on setting up your custom email address you can proceed with setting up the ability to send email from Gmail.
Steps
The steps in this guide to send email from your custom domain within your personal Gmail account will be as follows:
- Create an SMTP account with Amazon’s SES.
- Register your SMTP credentials in Gmail.
Let’s go through each of these steps in detail.
Step 1 – Create SMTP Account in Amazon SES
You will need to login to your AWS Amazon account and then from the Services menu click on Simple Email Service.
From the SES page on the left sidebar click on the label SMTP Settings.
Here you will see some core configuration settings for your SMTP credentials which you will need so you might want to copy them to your text editor:
- Server Name: email.smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
- Port: 25, 465 or 587
- Use Transport Layer Security (TLS): Yes
- Authentication: Your SMTP credentials.
Your configuration for the Server Name may be slightly different if you have selected a different location (look up at the top right-hand corner next to Support – to see which region your domain has been registered).
Register SMTP Credentials
To finish off this process click on the Create My SMTP Credentials button and follow through each of the prompts.
Create an IAM User Name to distinguish this user’s credentials. Once you have a basic user name then click on Create.
This next screen is very important as it will contain the unique user name and password that Gmail will need to create your SMTP account. Your username will be a combination of capitalised letters and numbers, and the password will be somewhat the same but with lower case letters.
Once you have captured these details and stored them safely it’s time to head on over to Gmail to register our new sending email address.
Step 2 – Register SMTP E-Mail in Gmail
Log in to your personal Gmail account, eg. johnsmith@gmail.com, and once you’re in click on the settings icon (usually an icon in the form of a bolt) followed by the Settings drop down menu item.
From the Settings area click on the tab with the label Accounts and Import, then find the area labelled Send mail as and within this area click on the link Add another email address.
This should pop up a modal window where you need to enter the following details:
- Name: Your Name
- Email address: you@your-domain.com
- Untick “Treat as alias” as you capture email through Lambda & S3 if you’ve followed the [prerequisite]({{< relref “#prerequisite” >}}) above.
On the last window enter the following details you’ve captured from Amazon SES:
- SMTP Server: email.smtp.us-east-1.amazonaws.com (the Server Name)
- Port: 587
- Username: SMTP credentials username
- Password: SMTP credentials password
- Select Secured connection using TLS (recommended)
Finally, click on the Add Account button and then Google will send through an email you will need to open and click on a link to verify.
If you’ve set up your Lambda and S3 inbound email service to forward through any emails to this very same Gmail service you’ve logged in as you will get an email very shortly. Otherwise, go and fetch the email to where you’ve set the custom domain to forward emails through to and click on the link.
Once you’ve confirmed the link you’re ready to send emails from within your personal Gmail service! All you need to do to send an email using your custom domain is in the From field of your email, to click on the tiny down arrow alongside your email address and then click the domain you wish to send your email from.
Easy as.
Conclusion
In this article we have learned how to set up an Amazon SES SMTP service by creating a unique username and password. You’ve been able to use the configuration settings on Amazon SES to then configure sending emails from your custom domain by using these settings in their respective fields in Gmail’s Settings area.
If you use software to manage your email, you can copy the same process over and apply the same settings.