Love the features and benefits of Gmail, but want your own custom email address? Google Apps make this possible. Here’s a little tutorial on setting up Gmail as the Mailbox for your Media Temple Grid-Service account (don’t forget to replace ‘yourdomainname.com’ with your actual domain name!)

Visit Google Apps and sign up for an account

Click here and fill out the documentation relating to your domain name.

Change the MX Records for your domain to point to Google’s mail server

1. Log in at http://ac.mediatemple.net
2. Click on the domain you wish to edit
3. Click Edit Zone File
4. Create 5 MX records with the following values:
   • 1 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
   • 5 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
   • 5 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
   • 10 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
   • 10 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
5. Click Save

Create a mail.yourdomainname.com folder in your domains folder.

Our next goal is to make sure that when a user visits mail.yourdomainname.com your Google Mail page is displayed.

1. In your FTP client browse to your domains folder.
2. Create a new folder called mail.yourdomainname.com
3. Within that folder create another folder called html

Create a .htaccess file with a 301 redirect.

When someone types in mail.yourdomainname.com we want them to be redirected to http://google.com/a/yourdomainname.com. The file we use to do this is called a .htaccessfile.

1. Create a file within your html folder (created in the last step) and name it .htaccess
2. Open the .htaccess file in your FTP client and add the following line: redirect 301 / http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomainname.com/
3. Save the file

Now you can navigate to mail.yourdomainname.com and manage your email.