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Setup Custom Domain Email on Google Cloud Platform

November 13, 2020 Leron Amin 38 Comments

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IMPORTANT: As of January 2018, Zoho no longer offers email forwarding and POP/IMAP as part of it’s free webmail service. Unless you have a Zoho paid account, you will not be able to use the POP/IMAP features that are required in order to complete this tutorial. On behalf of Zoho, we apologize for any inconvenience.

When running websites on Google Cloud Platform, it’s important to have a custom email address for your domain name.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the Zoho mail client to manage custom email accounts for your Google Cloud Platform websites.

Having custom email addresses is a great way to improve the professional appearance of your website.

This is part one of a two-part tutorial on how to configure domain name email using Zoho and Gmail, as an alternative to Google’s G Suite email service. View part two of this tutorial here.

Before getting started with this tutorial, you should have already configured a domain name for your website on Google Cloud Platform.

Why use custom email addresses?

There are many reasons why it’s important to have domain-name specific email addresses for you website.

If you’re running an online business, customers expect that domain-name specific email addresses will be used by your organization’s staff, as this reflects a certain level of professionalism.

Additionally, having domain-name specific email addresses for your websites administrators implies greater credibility. For example:

setup email for websites on google cloud

In my case specifically, using the the email address [email protected] instead of [email protected], immediately establishes that I am associated with One Page Zen.

Why use Zoho Mail?

With so many mail clients to choose from, why use Zoho?

The reason I use Zoho in this tutorial is because it is arguably the best low-cost email client alternative to GSuite.

The great thing about Zoho is that it offers most of the features of GSuite at a cost of only $1 per month.

Not only that – it’s easy to set up.

Disclaimer

I am in no way associated with Zoho Corporation and I do not receive any form of compensation, monetary or otherwise, for recommending their services.

Please leave questions and comments for this tutorial below!

Up Next…

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Filed Under: GCP Networking, Google Cloud Platform Tagged With: email, gmail, google cloud platform, gsuite, mail, wordpress, zoho

Comments

  1. Jhonathan says

    September 29, 2020 at 9:55 am

    Hello, Leron,

    Thanks for the article, it has been very useful to me.

    I have a query, is it possible to have email accounts from an instance? as done from a server

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      September 29, 2020 at 6:37 pm

      Hi Jhonathan,

      Are you wondering about hosting a mail server on your instance? This is indeed possible, but it’s likely more work than it’s worth, and you’ll end up paying more in hosting fees compared with using a dedicated email service such as Zoho or Gmail.

      Hope this helps and let me know if you have other questions,
      Joe

    • Jhonathan says

      September 30, 2020 at 7:45 am

      Hi Leron,

      Thank you for your answer it has been very useful

      I have another question and it is if I use a g suite account to have my email with a custom domain, would there be limitations or problems in the amount of email that can be sent from wordpress using smtp?

    • Leron Amin says

      October 21, 2020 at 7:17 am

      Hi Jhonathan,

      The limits are specific to Google Cloud and the arbitrary limits they impose on sending mail from instances, and is not dependent the mail service provider you’re using (e.g. Gsuite, Zoho, Outlook).

      Google (and any other cloud provider, for that matter), will always impose limits on the number of emails that are sent from it’s servers in an effort to prevent spam. From my experience, the limits are generally imposed when you’re trying to send large volumes of emails at the same time (e.g. sending an email to 200+ subscribers all at once). If this happens, they’ll typically throttle the number of outbound emails allowed for a period of time, before resuming the mail service.

      Hope this helps and let me know if you have other questions,
      Joe

  2. rakshit jain says

    May 24, 2020 at 6:31 am

    not working anymore in 2020

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      May 31, 2020 at 10:19 pm

      Hi Rakshit,

      Can you please provide specific details as to why it’s not working? This will help me to update the tutorial accordingly.

      Thanks,
      Joe

  3. Anthony says

    August 7, 2018 at 9:48 pm

    Hi Leron, Thanks for the great tutorials! They’ve been so helpful. Just on the topic of emails with Zoho, shame they started charging for their services, but it’s still cheaper than G suite and buying shared hosting. Nonetheless, I only seem to be able to have one user for my paid standard Zoho account and it seems they charge $2 (USD) per extra user per month. I’ve subscribed to yearly so it ends up being a fair bit. Their free account apparently offers up to 25 users but not multiple domains.
    I basically need a cheap (or free) solution to host my email with multiple addresses and domains. Would you know of any?
    Many thanks!

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      August 8, 2018 at 1:47 pm

      Hi Anthony,

      Thanks for the feedback!

      Unfortunately, the use case that you described – having email with multiple addresses and domains – is not likely to be a solution that you will be able to find for free.

      If you end up finding a solution, please let me know, as I’d be interested to learn more about it.

      Thanks and talk to you soon,
      Joe

    • Anthony says

      August 8, 2018 at 4:33 pm

      Hi Joe,

      Thanks for getting back to me. I’ve contacted Zoho support to see if it’s possible on the paid account but no reply so far.

      I’ve been using a shared hosting plan to host emails but the plan is coming to an end soon. Went with Zoho based on your tutorial so even if they charge and i can get multiple addresses on multiple domains on their standard plan, it will still be cheaper than shared hosting.

      Hopefully something comes up.šŸ˜‰

      Anthony

    • Leron Amin says

      August 8, 2018 at 9:38 pm

      Hey Anthony,

      I’m glad you reached out to Zoho, and I’m curious to know what they say. Please keep me posted!

      Talk to you soon,
      Joe

    • Angga says

      December 26, 2018 at 10:02 pm

      Hi Anthony,

      You can use service from mxroute.com email hosting with multiple domain and multiple users account starting from US $5 / month for 20GB total ssd space.

  4. Hemant says

    July 25, 2018 at 12:01 am

    Hi Leron !
    How are you?

    I have a question regarding server response time of a website

    how to set load time and finish time of a website on server?
    my site load time and finish time is same…
    share with me if you have any solution… šŸ™‚

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      July 25, 2018 at 12:24 am

      Hey Hemant,

      Optimizing your website, including server response times and load times, is not a subject I have a tutorial on.

      However, I’d say that the top three most important factors that determine your website’s performance are:

      1. Optimizing images
      2. Add scripts to bottom of page
      3. Use a CDN

      I will be releasing a tutorial on CDN configuration one of these days, so stay tuned!

      Talk to you soon,
      Joe

  5. H says

    July 20, 2018 at 1:40 pm

    Hi Mr. Joe,

    You told me to to reply to this page if I had any further problems regarding not receiving email. I am using WP Mail plugin, but it isn’t helping me.

    I tried contacting G Cloud and their support ‘specialist’ parroted the lines from this tutorial-
    https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/tutorials/sending-mail/#choosing_an_email_service_to_use

    I am not sure that it will help me, also the process seems tedious and alot can go wrong if I make a mistake..

    Please help me

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      July 21, 2018 at 2:16 pm

      Hi H,

      You don’t need to use a 3rd party client to send and receive emails from your WordPress website.

      You should download the WP Mail SMTP and configure it according to the instructions outlined in this tutorial.

      Hope this information helps and let me know if you have any questions,
      Joe

    • H says

      July 21, 2018 at 6:06 pm

      But then, I won’t be able to send emails from my site’s email([email protected])

    • Leron Amin says

      July 22, 2018 at 10:33 am

      Hi H,

      You’re simply routing your mail through Gmail’s servers – it doesn’t mean that you have to send mail from your Gmail address.

      What you need to do is add your website’s email to Gmail, then set it as the default email address. I go through this process starting with step 2 of this tutorial.

      Hope this helps,
      Joe

    • H says

      July 22, 2018 at 3:35 pm

      Well I did that, and here’s what I received in the end-

      Add another email address you own
      Confirm verification and add your email address

      Congratulations, we successfully located your other server and verified your credentials. Just one more step!
      An email with a confirmation code was sent to [email protected]. [Resend email]
      To add your email address, do one of the following:

      Click on the link in the confirmation email |
      OR
      | Enter and verify the confirmation code

      Any ideas?

    • Leron Amin says

      July 24, 2018 at 4:19 pm

      Hi H,

      Just follow those steps as instructed; you need to verify that you ‘own’ the email address before you can use it as an alias.

      Hope this helps!
      Joe

  6. Hemant says

    May 1, 2018 at 4:48 am

    Hi! How many email I can send from zoho per day for free.

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      May 1, 2018 at 9:11 am

      Hi Hemant,
      I’m not sure what the quotas are. If you find out, let me know.
      Thanks,
      Joe

  7. Giri says

    April 7, 2018 at 10:24 am

    Hi Leron,

    I have hosted WordPress website on GCP, I configured SMTP with Mailster plugin, but I get error, and can not send mail. can you help?

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      April 8, 2018 at 1:08 pm

      Hi Giri,
      I don’t know how to configure Mailster, so I would try using the STMP plugin and instructions from this tutorial.
      Let me know if you have any questions,
      Joe

  8. Informer says

    March 20, 2018 at 10:50 am

    Note: Zoho no longer offers imap nor pop access on free accounts, and they don’t inform users of this up front. So in my case, I went through this whole process only to have to undo it all and go elsewhere. Heads-up.

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      March 20, 2018 at 11:50 am

      Thanks for the update Informer – I put a notice at the top of the tutorial.
      Is there a free alternative that you recommend?

  9. Ashutosh Kumar says

    December 31, 2017 at 10:22 am

    Hi, I installed WordPress bitnami ON GCP but my website is whenever trying to send an email I am getting an error.

    I tried wp SMTP plugin and many things, tried to add Zoho mail smtp also. but nothing is working.

    Versions:
    WordPress: 4.9.1
    WordPress MS: No
    PHP: 7.0.25
    WP Mail SMTP: 1.2.2

    Params:
    Mailer: mail
    Constants: No
    ErrorInfo:
    Host: localhost
    Port: 25
    SMTPSecure: string(0) “”
    SMTPAutoTLS: bool(true)
    SMTPAuth: bool(false)

    Server:
    OpenSSL: Yes
    SMTP Debug:
    [empty]

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      January 1, 2018 at 2:20 pm

      Hi Ashutosh,
      Check out this post about configuring SMTP.
      If this doesn’t work for you, let me know and I will help you out.
      Talk to you soon,
      Joe

  10. Deepak Sodhi says

    December 22, 2017 at 10:25 pm

    Hello Please me I have getting some problem
    I have install deploy wordpress after that when i sending the mail i m getting the error
    and i m not accessing my folders also i try to edit through appearance through edit but same problem, i m trying give permission but not access any thing i m getting this error
    root@wordpress-5-vm:~# stat -c ā€œ%a %nā€ /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf
    stat: cannot stat ā€˜%nā€ā€™: No such file or directory
    ā€œ644
    root@wordpress-5-vm:~#

    and on email on wordpress i m getting this error

    There was a problem while sending a test email. Related debugging output is shown below:

    Versions:
    WordPress: 4.9.1
    WordPress MS: No
    PHP: 5.6.30-0+deb8u1
    WP Mail SMTP: 1.2.1

    Params:
    Mailer: mail
    Constants: No

    Server:
    PHP.mail(): Yes
    Apache.mod_security: No

    Please help me

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      December 22, 2017 at 11:53 pm

      Hi Deepak,

      When checking file permissions, try small sections at a time. For instance, start with stat -c ā€œ%a %nā€ /etc/ then work your way up to stat -c ā€œ%a %nā€ /etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress.conf, this is just necessary to ensure that the files exist in their assumed directories.

      Regarding the mail issue – I am not sure what the problem is. Try pasting sections of the output in Google and see if anyone has had a similar problem that they were able to resolve.

      Let me know if you have any questions,
      Joe

  11. NANA says

    August 6, 2017 at 4:34 am

    Hi
    I don’t Proceed to TXT or Cname Method Verification my Domain
    What is problem?

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      August 6, 2017 at 9:49 pm

      Hi Nana,
      That usually means that there is an issue with your Google Cloud DNS configuration.
      You can send a picture of your Cloud DNS to [email protected] and I will take a look for any problems.
      Hopefully, however, you’ve already resolved the issue.
      Thanks,
      Joe

  12. zion says

    July 21, 2017 at 5:05 am

    Hi
    I have a question that maybe related here

    I am trying to send an email from php code
    like this :
    Mail ($ to, $ subject, $ message, $ headers);

    On my server in Bluehost it works
    And it does not work on Googleclude

    I installed PHP and it works great
    I think the problem is in SMTP or something like that

    please help me
    Thank you very much

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      July 21, 2017 at 4:59 pm

      Hi Zion,
      This is an annoyance in Google Cloud, but it has to do with the fact that outbound connections are blocked on default ports 25, 465, and 587. You can work around this by configuring SMTP with a plugin – there are a bunch of them. I will do a tutorial on this at some point because it’s a problem faced by Google Cloud and GoDaddy Hosting customers.
      Thanks,
      Joe

  13. eric says

    July 14, 2017 at 8:29 pm

    again, thank you sir! took 10 minutes (that’s include pause and propagation) to setup everything. flawless instruction.

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      July 19, 2017 at 12:00 pm

      Awesome!
      I’m so glad it worked flawlessly for you!
      It seems like you’re already quite comfortable with GCP?
      Do you have a lot of background experience?
      Talk to you soon,
      Joe

  14. Vu says

    July 8, 2017 at 1:00 am

    I can not send email (zoho) from my site using GCP but I can do it with Gmail. How to resolve, please?

    Reply
    • Leron Amin says

      July 8, 2017 at 9:35 am

      Hi Vu,
      What do you mean “send email from my site”? Do you mean through a contact form?
      Let me know!
      Joe

  15. Leron Amin says

    June 30, 2017 at 10:25 am

    Did this tutorial work for you?
    What do you think of the Zoho email platform interface?

    Reply

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