With a “.ie” your options are rea­son­ably broad though in most cases, DNS host­ing of that domain only comes as part of a host­ing pack­age (if you want to host your own DNS, enjoy!). In the end I went with Black­night, and the expe­ri­ence so far, par­tic­u­larly with their tech­ni­cal sup­port has been very good. In com­mon with nearly all host­ing com­pa­nies, they offer you an assorted bag of host­ing, data­bases, appli­ca­tion frame­works, and email. In com­mon with most host­ing com­pa­nies, the email appli­ca­tion is… crap. Indeed, one major host­ing com­pany, Dreamhost, has stopped pro­vid­ing it alto­gether.

I wanted a lit­tle more… like per­va­sive, reli­able, easy to use web inter­face, access through my desk­top clients, mobile access, and per­haps some other bells and whis­tles you get used to when using email in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment. Like a cal­en­dar, con­tacts, meet­ing requests, instant messaging!

Short of get­ting my own Microsoft Exchange server (which some peo­ple have done), there are few enough options out there for the gen­eral pub­lic. Microsoft try, in a dis­jointed fash­ion, with Win­dows Live Mail and the Out­look con­nec­tor (where, oh where is cal­en­dar sync­ing?). I won’t go into the has­sle I had with cre­at­ing a “yahoo.ie” address, but they still lag with noth­ing but POP3 access on the desk­top. Google has the most com­plete offer­ing, with their Google Apps For Domains, offer­ing Gmail, Docs, Cal­en­dar, Sites, with IMAP access for Out­look, and the Mobil GMAIL app. There is still a “hung together” feel to it all, but if you want a more effec­tive email solu­tion for your own domain, short of get­ting your own exchange server, it is the best choice.

Reg­is­ter­ing for Google Apps For Domains is sim­ple and free. If you have your own domain (with Black­night for exam­ple…), Google will require you prove your own­er­ship. Typ­i­cally this is done by cre­at­ing a CNAME (an alias for a server name in DNS) with a google sup­plied name (I could not do this with my Black­night host­ing), or by cre­at­ing a page on your web­site with a Google sup­plied name (which was the route I took).  Once ver­i­fied, you then need to instruct your host­ing com­pany to set up CNAME’s and other DNS records to point cer­tain ser­vices at Google. You can use the fol­low­ing as a model:

To Whom It May Concern:

Please setup the fol­low­ing DNS records for my domain(s): foo.ie, foo.com:

foo.ie IN MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.ie IN MX 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.ie IN MX 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.ie IN MX 10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
foo.ie IN MX 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

foo.com IN MX 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.com IN MX 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.com IN MX 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
foo.com IN MX 10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
foo.com IN MX 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.

mail.foo.ie. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
mail.foo.com. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
docs.foo.ie. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
docs.foo.com. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
sites.foo.ie. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
sites.foo.com. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
start.foo.ie. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
start.foo.com. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
calendar.foo.ie. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com
calendar.foo.com. CNAME IN 3600 ghs.google.com

_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.ie. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_xmpp-server._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 5 0 5269 xmpp-server.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server1.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server2.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server3.l.google.com.
_jabber._tcp.foo.com. IN SRV 20 0 5269 xmpp-server4.l.google.com.

Regards,

This should cover your new foo.ie or foo.com domain for all of Google’s ser­vices. Bear in mind that it could take up to 24 hours for it all to prop­a­gate around the inter­net. Once the addresses are in DNS, go back to Google Apps and fol­low the instruc­tions in this note to imple­ment friendly URLs for your ser­vices. All that is left is to set up IMAP in Out­look. This tuto­r­ial from www.howtogeek.com is about the best one out there.

Next… Word­Press!