Hacking GMail to use custom domains for free | Hacker News Reader

Hacking GMail to use custom domains for free

simplyian.com

18 pointssimplyianm8 comments

>It’s pretty much common knowledge that GMail is awesome. It’s fast, [..]

Okay, maybe Gmail is powerful, but I don't agree that Gmail is fast. I guess it depends on what you compare it to, or if you have low performance standards in general. I run offlineimap + mutt for my email, and all mail related operations are near-instant (~10-20ms). Gmail often takes more than a second to switch between my folders/filters. That makes it about 100 times slower than my solution. And my solution runs on my 3 year old laptop. Not to mention the hundreds of megabytes wasted in showing a webpage in a browser that could be put to good use caching things that I actually care about.

That aside, whats the "hack" here? How to send email using an SMTP server?

What part of this is hacking?

Or you can just forward all emails using your DNS setting to a @gmail.com account then add the domain name email as an account your own in the Gmail settings...

That no longer works.

This isn't new. I purchased my domain through NameCheap and have been using custom domain email through gmail for a couple years now.

Custom domains with GMail used to be free for the longest time, until Google started changing their pricing policy. The final free option disappeared in 2014. [1] This article points out a hacky way of still getting it free.

[1] All previously acquired free accounts are grandfathered, this is all about making new accounts.

I wasn't grandfathered in. I did a similar process to what the OP did. My point was just that you need not use mailgun. All you need are the settings from your smtp to plug into gmail and that's nothing new.

I've also have been doing this for over a year now. When I compose a email, there is a drop down for what domain I want to send from.

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