Use Personalized Email & Host Multiple Domains on .Mac
With so many domain name registration firms popping up left, right and centre, and with many providing at least semi-decent interfaces for updating the domain details yourself, it is extremely cheap and easy to set up a domain and then setup a dotmac account for your web site, whilst at the same time using your own personal email with that domain.
In this article I detail 2 ways in which you can forward one or more domains to your dotmac homepage or elsewhere and how to set up an email address for yourself, either as a forwarder, or as a pop account. I will also make a brief outline of setting up the emails in Apple Mail and some tips on avoiding SPAM.
For the purpose of this article, I will outline registration of a domain with the domain registration firm namecheap.com, but popular alternatives include: godaddy, and more …
Registering Your Domain at Namecheap
To register a domain you have to start by searching to see if it is available, something that you can do from the namecheap.com home page. When you find the domain you like which is available, put it in the cart and go through the checkout process. If you are a first time user you will need to register on the site, a process which is FREE. Once you have registered as a user on the site, processed payment for the domain and completed the registration process for the domain, you are ready to setup the domain and point it at your .mac webspace.
Setting Up The Domain: URL Redirect or Frame URL
When logged into your account, and looking at the "Member’s Home Page", click on "Manage Domains" from the blue "My Account" menu bar at the top of the page. This should produce a list of hyperlinked domains. Click on the domain you just registered, which will load up the contact details for the domain, also a menu will be revealed to the left hand side of the page. Under "Hosting Management" you should see a link to "All Host Records", click this and a new page containing the details for the domain will load.
The headers for the columns are laid out as follows:
- Hostname
- IP Address/URL
- Record Type
- MX Pref (optional
)
In the top two records you will see in the Hostname field: "@" and "WWW", for both of these you have a selection of two record types: URL Redirect & URL Frame.
URL Redirect
If you select this record type, when a visitor to your site requests that domain in their browser, they will be sent onwards to your dotmac homepage address, which will then be visible in their browser address bar.
URL Frame
When selecting this record type any visitor to your domain will effectively be sent to a web page with frames, one of which will be minimized and therefore invisible to the naked eye, and the other which will contain the contents of your .mac web site. In this instance the visitor will not be forwarded on and they will continue to see your web site address/domain in their browser address bar. When they load new pages, the content will change but the address bar will remain the same.
From a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective, URL Redirect is the better option, though if you are using iWeb, the benefits of URL Redirect over URL Frame would be put in reverse, as namecheap.com actually provides an extremely useful and nifty tool for putting keyword meta data into the frameit generates when using he URL Frame record type.
If you do wish to setup meta keywords for search engine optimization purposes having selected and saved the host record types as URL Frame, then go to the following page: My Account > Manage Domains > Host Management > URL Frame Meta Tags and enter the required data.
Once you have made the desired settings and saved them, you should be able to test the domain. Domains usually take only a few minutes to begin working after you register them, and changes to the DNS Host records will work within 30 minutes at most, though would be almost immediate if you don’t preload, and therefore cache for upto 30 mins, the host records for the domain.
Setup Your Personalized Emails
As with the domain and web address, there are two options, to setup a mail forwarder, so that any email to that domain will be sent onwards to the forwarding email, or to purchase a POP3 pack of emails from namcheap.com, which you can then use as individual emails with their own login and password, alteratively, you can use a third-party web host, though setting up the necessary domain records for that is beyond the remit of this article.
To get setup, visit the page: My Account > Manage Domains > Host Management > All Host Records. From there, select the desired options from the "Mail Settings", either:
- Email Forwarding (Uses the namecheap account registration email address)
- POP3/Webmail + Email Forwarding (Optional POP3 Account Purchase Required)
After this, simply follow the instruction provided by the namecheap.com web site.
Configure Your Mail Client: Apple Mail
Now that you have your email set up you will want to setup Apple Mail to be able to send and receive emails on that address.
If you merely setup an email address forwarder then you need to cheat a little. This means that you will have to still use your mac.com email to send and receive through, but because of changes you are about to make in your Apple Mail account preferences, to outside viewers, given just a cursory look over any emails received, mails will appear as if it came from your personalized email address, and when they reply it will only show that personalized email in the "To" field.
So to get configured for using your email , go to "Preferences" > "Account". Select the desired dotmac account. In the "Account Information" tab set the "Full Name" and "Email Address" fields accordingly, and then close the Mail preferences window. The new settings should now be saved. Nothing else need be changed.
Tips on Avoiding SPAM
If you setup multiple forwarders to the same email address you might end up finding that this is a quick and easy way to aggregate spam. not the best way to keep you happy and to save time!
On the whole, if you have a non standard email address and if you are careful about who you share it with, you "should" be okay and receive no, or little spam. On the other hand, if you setup email addresses such as contact@, info@, sales@ etcetera, you are just inviting SPAM. In fact you might as well slap a sticker on your forehead that says: "I Love SPAM!"; because with standard addresses, spammers send out emails to domains using such common address names, even when they have no nothing about your domain. So teer clear of using such email addresses on your domain. Good alternatives might include: contactsales@, findourmore@, or contactHQ@ for example.
Another thing you might want to avoid is a default catch-all option, which again will just funnel SPAM into your mail inbox.
Multiple Domains and Multiple Emails
Nothing would in fact stop you from using your .mac webspace to host multiple websites, or domains. Either to point them at the same directory or different directories, and without any form of navigation between the domains you needn’t worry about them getting mixed up. And with sepearate domains you can of course setup different emails for.
To use your dotmac web space to host multiple domains, simply setup and publish your webfiles to different directories in your .ac account and then use either record type for your domain in namecheap.com, though preferrably URL Frame to send the visitor onto dotmac.
Conclusion: It’s All About YOU
If giving people what they want counts for something, being able to use your own, easier to remember domain, along with your own personalized email address(es) then that has to be a good thing. Namecheap definitely makes it exceedingly easy to accomlish this goal and at a very reasonable price. Setting all of this up isn’t necessarily a total no-brainer or for the faint of heart, but it definitely isn’t that hard or impossible to do. If you do decide to go it alone, then good luck, but the rewards are worth it for sure.
