Hey! Spot that font settings button? Give it a click to switch between regular fonts and ones specially designed for folks with ADHD or dyslexia. Makes reading a whole lot easier for some brains!
If you are using node/edge hosting for your site like so many people are these days, there is generally a hidden cost that used to be no concern back in the halcyon days of CPanel.
Email.
It was something we took for granted, all Cpanel hosting just had it built in and working. Nowadays you would need to either purchase email hosting via another provider or use something like G suite. However there is another Alternative, Email Forwarding/Routing. This involves using a service like Cloudflare, ImprovMX and Forward Email, attach it to your domain name and then use it to forward the emails to the address of your choice to any free email account.
The downside here is you can’t reply using your shiny new domain name… unless you use Gmail.
I’m writing this out as it is far easier to do in practice than my mind tricks me to believe.
Important: you will need to have 2fa (2 factor authentication) enabled on your google account to create an App Password.
Step 1: Create an App password.
Hit the cog icon to open up quick settings, then click through to “See all settings”
Scroll down to the bottom and click “Search Google Account” this will open a search bar at the top of your screen. Search for “App passwords”
Once in there, create a new app password. Name it so you know what it is.
IMPORTANT once created this is the the only time it will be visible to you. Make sure you copy it down somewhere safe (secure notes/password manager like bitwarden), You will need this in a future step.
Step 2: add account and change SMTP to googles
Head on back to your settings page (settings → all settings) and find the “Accounts and Import” tab.
from. From here look for “Send mail as:” and click on add another email address.
You will be presented with some ui that looks left over from 1998. Fill this out with Name being what name will be attached to the email, and the address will be the one you set up in your forwarder. Then hit “Next step”
You will see some variation of this screen, it may have some prefilled info like the SMTP that your email address is currently running. You will need to change the following.
SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com
port: 587 (unless specified by your router to be different)
Username: This is the username to your gmail account, so everything that comes before the @ symbol.
Password: this is the App password we generated earlier.
Once the new email is added, a verification email will be sent, head to your inbox and confirm. (If you don’t receive a confirmation email, you have likely either entered a different address in google to the one you entered in your forwarding/routing service).
Step 3: make new email the default (optional)
Ok so we are now functional but lets add some polish. There are two settings you can enable depending on your situation. If you are sending multiple different emails to the same gmail account you can enable “Reply from the address the message was sent to” this will stop you accidentally replying with your gmail address or one of the other addresses you may have added. You can also set a default address, and set to always reply as default as seen below.
Hopefully easy enough.
Until next time 🤘
P.S. I have realised that I have set my blog to not handle images well in terms of demonstration and have added enlarging images to list of features.