ZachIsHere

Technology is making our lives easier. Right? Right?!?

A good portion of this week has been spent wrestling one bit of technology after another. Ok, maybe I am being dramatic. I enjoy taking on the challenges and learning new things that enable me to present things in a new exciting way or make it so I can bring in revenue.

Google Apps was the first mountain to climb. Google has set up a system where you can integrate some of their services with your own domain. There are a lot of different ways this could be useful especially in the business world but I only had one thing in mind. Google Mail. I absolutely love GMail, it is so quick and the search\organization features are fantastic. I really liked the idea of being able to use a @ZCPhotography.com domain mail name with the GMail interface. I skimmed through the documentation and for the most part it was a simple and straight forward process. The protocol for checking that you are the owner of the domain was as simple as adding a small html file with one line of code in the root directory. After picking up on that you sign in, through Google’s servers you can manage and set up the different services they offer for your domain from a dashboard area. I went to set up the e-mail portion and the process involved changing your servers DNS MX records. They list instructions based on the software that is used to control your back end. I was surprised that Plesk wasn’t on the list, back end software is not my department but I thought it would be there. There was an option that was for any of hosts that were not on the list and the process seemed pretty easy. Gave me the information I needed to check the records. I did as it said and waited. Feeling impatient I went ahead and tried to sign on and to my surprise it was already set up. I sent some mail to myself and everything seemed to be in place, even sent an e-mail to everyone telling them of my change of address. Woops, only fools rush in. Turns out I could send messages but not get them. There was something wrong in the settings. I did a lot of digging around some different forums and found out the problem. Hopefully someone digging around for the solution to same problem will find this page.

Geektalk warning…

If you are setting up GMail with Google Apps on your domain and using Plesk there is something it doesn’t tell you. When you put in the MX records and values don’t put anything in the “enter mail domain” field.

mail.zcphotography.com. ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. MX (10)
zcphotography.com. ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. MX (10)

The account worked instantly after the “mail” subdomain was left off and the records were put in correctly. I really like this option because I hated using most POP3 webmail programs and have fallen in love with GMail. It is important to have an e-mail address from the domain and company name I am using, it adds trust.

Part 2 will deal with my experience in Flash.