Take control of your email
Think about it… What would be the impact of losing access to your email ? How many services would depend on accessing your inbox ?
You need to wire some money urgently. You log on to your bank portal but your bank needs you to reset your password, sending you a password reset link you cannot access... Or you need to access an important document in your inbox to close a deal…
You might think email services such as Gmail are reliable. They are. The chances of them being unavailable are small. But they might be up and running and still require multiple factor authentication methods preventing you from logging in. That happened to me when my iPhone ran out of battery…
And then there are these ads that you do not want to see on the web based mail clients. They might not be that intrusive, but they are there and you do not need them.
So… take control of your email! You’ll be able to define the email address you want provided your domain name of choice is available, be as reliable as yahoo or google, be ads free, connect your favorite email client to your own email server, access interesting stats on your email usage, and — cherry on the cake — if you need to, send email marketing campaigns if you need to (within limits).
Besides… How cool is it to have you own email address ?
In this article we will show you how to setup your email address in 4 different steps:
- Register your own domain name
- Create your email server
- Create your email address
- Connect your email client to it
Register your own domain name
Your domain name will be the name you want to use after the @ sign of your email address. For the sake of this article, my own address is marcse@smarcsoft.fr. smarcsoft.fr is therefore my domain name.
Your domain name need to be registered on the internet, and you’ll need to pay a small yearly fee to keep it, usually around 20 bucks a year. It is your internet digital name. It can be the name of your company (usually ending with .com), the name of your organisation (usually ending with .org), whatever entity you want to name.
Registering your domain name is easy. Finding a good name available is less so. There are a few domain name registration services available. I personally use ionos, others use GoDaddy or google. Try them up for yourself. An example of search on my own domain name yields to the following on GoDaddy:
You see that you can purchase smarcsoft.net for 15 bucks a year.
Once you buy your domain name, you will be able to modify DNS entries to point to it. DNS (Domain Name Service) is like a directory of the internet. When users type your domain name, they are pointing to a machine. You therefore need to communicate to the internet where this machine is. You do this using DNS. This is fairly simple, don’t worry too much about it.
In our email example, when people type my email address (such as marcse@smarcsoft.fr), i need to tell the internet where is the mail server that will accept this email. The mail server will be running on the computer pointed by smarcsoft.fr. I therefore need to tell DNS where is smarcsoft.fr.
Create your email server
Your mail server will accept all incoming emails directed to your email address(es) and will then send them to your email clients (outlook, Apple mail etc…) for your consumption.
Nowadays, cloud companies are facilitating the setup of a mail server, otherwise called an SMTP server. I personally use AWS WorkMail. To use AWS WorkMail you need an account to AWS. This is easy, just follow these instructions. You won’t be charged unless you create resources.
Creating a mail server with AWS WorkMail will come at a cost of 4 bucks with 50 GB of disk space (which will be used to store your emails). Each email has a size limit of 25MB which is reasonable.
So let’s get started! The first step is to create an organization in AWS WorkMail.
By default, your domain name belongs to AWS (ending with awsapps.com). You need to change it to your own domain name.
Go to the domains section of the organization:
Click on the verification status and then domain details. You’ll see that your all you domain entries are missing. This is because you need to update them on your DNS provider.
To facilitate the DNS administration, we will transfer your DNS server to AWS, specifically we will ask AWS Route 53 to be your DNS. To do this, go to Route 53 and create a hosted zone:
Then go to the detailed settings of your new hosted zone:
Note the 4 name servers, then go to your DNS provider (usually where you registered your domain name), and create a custom name server where you register the 4 AWS name servers. This will instruct your legacy name server to hand over the DNS queries to the AWS DNS server. AWS Route 53 will then become your DNS server.
Once this is done, go to your WorkMail organization, section domains, click on your domain, and copy the DNS settings (copy all button):
Then go the Route 53 and import the setting into a zone file for your new domain:
Your DNS settings should then be correctly configured. You can check it out by going to AWS Workmail, section domains. You domain name should show the status verified:
Note that it should also be the default domain.
If you got that far, you did the hard part. The rest is easy.
Create your email address
At this stage, your SMTP infrastructure is up and running, but you do not have any email address yet. To create an email address, you need to create a user. Go to AWS Workmail, and create a user:
Congratulations, you now have your email address. To check it out, Go to AWS WorkMail and notice the web link on the bottom right corner:
Click on it, log in with your user ID and password. You should now have access to your inbox:
Observe the URL of your email web https://webmail.mail.us-east-1.awsapps.com/workmail/?organization=smarcsoft-fr. It contains the region where your inbox is located: us-east-1 in this example. Make a note of it, it will come useful to connect an email client to your inbox.
Time to try it out: Send yourself an email to your new email address!
Connect your email client to it
Let’s take Microsoft mail as an email client example. Similar settings will apply to other email clients such as Outlook or Apple Mail. In your email client, Add a new account and click “Advanced setup” to configure the SMTP server manually:
Depending on the email client, you’ll be asked different information, but you’ll need you email address (like smarc@smarcsoft.fr), the user name (smarc in this case), the password of the AWS Workmail user, an account type (choose IMAP, not POP3), an incoming email server and an outgoing email server.
The incoming email server depends on the AWS region where your inbox is located (hopefully you took note of it in the previous section).
For region us-east-1 please enter imap.mail.us-east-1.awsapps.com
For region us-west-2 please enter imap.mail.us-west-2.awsapps.com
For region eu-west-1 please enter imap.mail.eu-west-1.awsapps.com
The outgoing email server is configured as follow:
For region us-east-1 please enter smtp.mail.us-east-1.awsapps.com
For region us-west-2, please enter smtp.mail.us-west-2.awsapps.com
For region eu-west-1, please enter smtp.mail.eu-west-1.awsapps.com
To setup your inbox on Windows mail, select Advanced Setup, then Internet Email and enter the following settings, replacing my email details with yours obviously:
Congratulations! You should have your emails in Windows Mail.
A few additional notes:
You’ve done quite a lot if you followed this article. You got your own internet domain. You have setup an entire email infrastructure that you can control. You can for example create email addresses for your friends and family on your internet domain. Managing yourself such a critical part of our day to day life is becoming important as more and more of the services we are using depend on it. A nice side effect to this additional control is the ability to create ephemeral email addresses. Create a new user in WorkMail if you do not want to give your main email address. It is a good way to fool companies selling your email details and stay away from spam.
Hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think.
