Gmail – Script Everything

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.

Today was a sad day.

For the first time I had to set up a domain and where I didn’t utilise Google’s Apps free services in structuring the email side of the domain. Over the last decade I’ve enjoyed being able to use Google’s free services, but alas that time has now finished and to use their services it will cost you US$5/month.

What Google should have provided is a free year’s worth of Google Apps services for a newly created domain just so users can get used to their wonderful services and then pay for the privilege of continuing with that service once they’ve established their domain. But then again who has never heard of Gmail before?

And with Google offering their services for free to students in the education industry it’s likely everyone will know what Gmail is, fall in love with it when they’re at school and university, and then demand it from their employers when they work.

Anyway, regardless of their decision or what they should have done, what’s done is done.

What I’ve had to search around for is an alternative 3rd party supplier of email accounts for a domain.

And I’ve been happy with my new provider: Zoho Mail

Their interface isn’t as seamless as Google’s, but it was still very easy to structure my first email account with them. I’ll keep you posted on the development of the domain with the free Zoho service, but for now it’s a good alternative to Google Apps and I’d highly recommend them to anyone.