You can no longer attach your domain to Gmail for free as you could do a year or so ago. Now it's called Google for Business and also includes Google Drive, Google Calendar and more. It's all beautiful except for one thing: it's now not free. I just need mail, one address, nothing else.
Is there still a way to do it for free for a new domain?
I've seen some workarounds, but they seem to be outdated, so I'd like to know if it's possible to use an alternate method or not.
If there's no way to have it, maybe there's a good alternative to have email address on my own domain attached to an external mail service?
Having a mail server on my server or paying €3/month just for mail isn't as good as a free option.
Best Answer
Depending on your domain registrar (or maybe you have hosting/email?) you can forward an email address (eg. joe@example.com) to your gmail account. Gmail can then be configured to send mail as joe@example.com.
Or, if you actually have a hosted mailbox for joe@example.com then you can get gmail to download (POP3) mail from this mailbox.
Either way, you can use gmail to manage your email.
However, a slight caveat with the send-mail-as approach (by default at least) is that it is sent via gmail's servers (by default) and this is indicated to the recipient in the form of a Sender mail header (which might appear visually as something like "sent via joe@gmail.com" in the recipients email client). But otherwise it does work quite well.
If, however, you already have your own external (SMTP) mail server through which you can send email for your domain, but just wish to use Gmail to manage your email then you can use your own SMTP server to send email. This avoids the Sender header being set and is entirely transparent to the recipient. The recipient will be unaware you are using Gmail - which is now simply an email client.