So, we promised, when we rolled out the DNS editing, that we’d tell you how to install Google Apps yourself if you didn’t want us to do it for you. Unfortunately, life intruded and we forgot. Luckily, we were reminded, and here’s the promised post 2 weeks late.

What do I need to know before installing Google Apps?

Most people go to Google Apps for the email as its a fantastic webmail app with all the Google-Search goodness, its free, and it gets you a lot more space. The difference between Google Apps and a regular Gmail account is that Google Apps works directly with your domain – there’s no forwarding this, pop that, program this to answer as that kind of stuff. It is where your domain mail goes.

Now, it *is* where your domain’s mail goes – your email will never, ever come here for your domain again. Once the MX Records are changed, they handle your mail. If you have problems with mail delivery, you go to them, not us.

That means you are giving up nearly every feature under “Mail” in cPanel – mailing lists, forwarding, pop accounts, the whole nine yards. With Mailing Lists, discussion lists, this is a big deal because you don’t have any functionality in Apps to replace it. With forwarding, not so much – Google Apps is giving 50 accounts on Standard at no charge, and using their settings you can filter and forward. (For those trying to get around our off site forwarding ban, here’s your answer – we don’t care if you forward from your Apps account. It’s not our IPs that would get Blacklisted and, frankly, Google is way too big for anyone to even think about blacklisting them.)

If you are having problems now that we use tokens in getting your mail from work in webmail from work, this is also your answer – Google Apps operates on a regular web server port, so unless your company blocks Apps specifically, you won’t have a problem getting mail and you can pull your stored mail into Google Apps (though set aside some time to re-tag it into different folders).

There is no cost for Google Apps to Google if you used standard, and there is no discount off your hosting because you’re not using our mail accounts.

I still want to do it – how do I set it up?

First thing you’ll need to do is go open a Google Apps account. You do that at

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

and click the “Get Started” button. On the first page, you’ll click “Administrator: I own or control this domain“, and give them your domain name, no www. or anything attached – just domain.com, and click “Get Started“.

The next page is where they gather the account information and its all pretty straightforward. If you aren’t a company you don’t need to provide company names, though we have had clients make up some, like “Local Deity” as a Job Title. Once you get through all that, making sure to check that you know you have to change your DNS, click to go to the next page, which will be “Set up – Create your first administrator account (step 3 of 3)“

This administrator account is going to be two things – your main login to administrate all of your Google Apps account, and a Gmail Apps account, so if you have an email address you’re using its a good idea to put it here.  Pick a good password, make it through Captcha, and agree to Google’s TOS. Once you do that, the fun of changing DNS begins.

OK, I have the Apps Account – how do I hook it up?

Once you agree to Google’s Legalese, your next page will welcome you to Google Apps. Now, you have an Apps account at the moment, but its not activated – Google wants you to prove that this is your domain. You can do that by either uploading a file, or creating a CName record. Since we are going to have to play with the DNS eventually we may as well start now, so click “Change domain.com CNAME record” and then click continue.

Google wants you to create a cName pointing to its site so that it can verify you have control of this domain. Leaving this tab or window open, open up a new tab or window, and go to cPanel, and then click on “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”.

Ok, back on Google’s page, #2 says “Use the following unique string to create a new CNAME record for the domain.com domain:” and that string will look something like google72c80c5640c1fd7f - we want to put that where it says “Name”. Just cut and paste it.

For TTL, look down below to see what your TTL is on all your other records – cut and paste or type whatever that number is in the TTL field.

Under “Type” we want a CName, and the CNAME is always going to be google.com. Hit add record.

Now, go back to your Apps window and tell Google you did this by clicking “I’ve completely the steps above.” It will bring you to a set up guide to introduce you to the service – busy work for you while they verify the CNAME. You can come back to this later – since almost everyone gets Apps to get mail, let’s go ahead and set that up now. Click “Dashboard“.

Your dashboard is going to show you all your Apps. If you notice, your Email app says its not active. We want to change that, so click “Activate Email”.

Activating Your Email

When we set Google Apps up for you, we do not set up more than one user. Changing MX Records will, as we said, change all mail handling from us, to Google. Obviously, if you have only one email account set up on Apps and you have 30 email accounts on your domain that you are switching to Apps, this would be a bit of a problem, hence why some folks want to do this themselves.

If you have more than one email account on your domain, you do not want to change your MX Records now. The message:

“If your domain already has email addresses, please be careful
changing MX records. To avoid disruption in email service, be sure to
create the same set of user accounts with the control panel before
changing your MX records”

applies directly to you. You will want to click on “Users and Groups“, and on that page “Create a new user” for every email account that you are moving first, ensuring that email will go one place or the other, and not get lost in the transition. Once you have done that, you can join the rest of us back at the “Activating Email” page.

“Set up email delivery”

So we should be on the activating email page which says “Set up email delivery“. (Again, we get to it by clicking “Dashboard” and then clicking “Activate Email” under the Email area). This is where you are actually, formally going to change email delivery from our servers to Google. The instructions for “any hosting company” are fine as long as your DNS is here and for the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that they are. If they are at your registrar, use the drop down list to find how to edit DNS records for your registrar and follow those instructions instead of these.

In your second window, Navigate to the “Home” panel, and find the “MX Entry” button under “Mail”. At the bottom, you’ll see “MX Records, and it should say “0″ under priority, and the destination is your domain name. If you have any need to change this back at any time to our servers, you’ll need to delete the Google servers and return the record to just what you see now.

But for now, we’re going to nuke that puppy, so click “Delete” under actions. Really. Go ahead. It won’t blow up, I swear.

Under #4 on the Google page, you will see a set of records you have to input. At the moment, they are the following:

MX Server address	Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.	20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.	30

However, these can and do change periodically as Google balances mail load so you will want to put in the server addresses that google gives you. You want to cut and paste the MX Server Address into the destination under “Add New Record”, and then its proper priority in, obviously, the priority field. When giving you the MX addresses, Google gives you the trailing period, which is necessary in an MX Record – however, cPanel adds that in for you and it will give you an error if you actually cut and paste that, so instead of

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

you will want to cut and paste simply

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

and leave off that period at the end.

You should wind up with a Cpanel listing that looks similar to this at the end: