I've learned through experience on the Admin side of things that the e-mail accounts we get through free hosting in general are VERY vulnerable to hacking unless one takes very careful precautions, and not everyone does that. When I was checking what available options there are for dedicated e-mail hosts, came across articles where it is recommended to have a different e-mail host to the one for the Website.
There are a number of recommended e-mail hosts like Rackspace, FastMail, Google Apps, Microsoft etc., but all of those are paid hosts when it gets to setting one's accounts up with one's own domain. In a range I'm not comfortable paying. So felt really lucky when I came across Zoho Mail. At first I was very cynical thinking that it is probably going to be too good to be true. Also that it probably will be a headache to set up and won't work. But not so. There is a category of a free Zoho Mail Account where one can have up to 20 e-mail boxes for free. With one's own domain. No Ads either. And it wasn't that difficult to set up at all.
All one has to do is go to the Zoho Website, then navigate to "free signup" at the link below:
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
Note: Don't sign up for the trial, go straight to "free" which can be upgraded later if one wants to do that.
Zoho then puts one through a verification process to prove one is the owner of the domain. I chose the html check and that was fairly painless. All I had to do was go into the root of my domain in cpanel, create a new zoho check folder (zoho specifies the name of the folder), and then upload a folder that Zoho provides to be downloaded for uploading to that folder. It was instant verification.
Next step, was to set up all of the member accounts. That was pretty effortless too.
Then the part which I was sure would bomb out was DNS - creating the MX records. Probably the DNS didn't trip me up as much (had a wait only of 12 hours for the DNS to propagate) as I hadn't set up my domain with mailboxes before. So it was quite easy to figure out and logical that one needed to delete the MX records that are there first. I had one for the domain, and was able to locate it in the cPanel e-mail folder for MX records. I first deleted it, then created two MX records for Zoho.com. And instead of having a local server, changed it to external.
I then did test mails. Initially I thought it was not going to work, as there was no instant receipt of the test mails to the domain, but after about 12 hours when I checked in, all of the e-mails were there. I was really surprised but happy .... so far. Zoho has gone up one notch in my estimation.
What was also great was I had a change of mind who I wanted the super admin account to be and also wanted to change the e-mail address of the super admin. And I was able to do those changes with no hazzle at all.
I'm still wondering if there is a catch though, so watch this space for a report back. So far so good.![Good]( "Good")
There are a number of recommended e-mail hosts like Rackspace, FastMail, Google Apps, Microsoft etc., but all of those are paid hosts when it gets to setting one's accounts up with one's own domain. In a range I'm not comfortable paying. So felt really lucky when I came across Zoho Mail. At first I was very cynical thinking that it is probably going to be too good to be true. Also that it probably will be a headache to set up and won't work. But not so. There is a category of a free Zoho Mail Account where one can have up to 20 e-mail boxes for free. With one's own domain. No Ads either. And it wasn't that difficult to set up at all.
All one has to do is go to the Zoho Website, then navigate to "free signup" at the link below:
https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html
Note: Don't sign up for the trial, go straight to "free" which can be upgraded later if one wants to do that.
Zoho then puts one through a verification process to prove one is the owner of the domain. I chose the html check and that was fairly painless. All I had to do was go into the root of my domain in cpanel, create a new zoho check folder (zoho specifies the name of the folder), and then upload a folder that Zoho provides to be downloaded for uploading to that folder. It was instant verification.
Next step, was to set up all of the member accounts. That was pretty effortless too.
Then the part which I was sure would bomb out was DNS - creating the MX records. Probably the DNS didn't trip me up as much (had a wait only of 12 hours for the DNS to propagate) as I hadn't set up my domain with mailboxes before. So it was quite easy to figure out and logical that one needed to delete the MX records that are there first. I had one for the domain, and was able to locate it in the cPanel e-mail folder for MX records. I first deleted it, then created two MX records for Zoho.com. And instead of having a local server, changed it to external.
I then did test mails. Initially I thought it was not going to work, as there was no instant receipt of the test mails to the domain, but after about 12 hours when I checked in, all of the e-mails were there. I was really surprised but happy .... so far. Zoho has gone up one notch in my estimation.
What was also great was I had a change of mind who I wanted the super admin account to be and also wanted to change the e-mail address of the super admin. And I was able to do those changes with no hazzle at all.
I'm still wondering if there is a catch though, so watch this space for a report back. So far so good.
