Configuring email forwarding on my new site

26th Jul 2022

Getting Name.com, Netlify, and Forward Email to work together

New portfolio site, a fun domain name, and… a gmail email address???

Through the last couple of weeks, I’ve been developing my new website. It’s been a fun experience. I created a prototype in Figma, I’ve queried various API’s, heck, I even customized my 404 page. I went through all the work of paying attention to the small details, revising my designs over and over and I was gonna tell people to email me at mygmailaddress@gmail.com??? Not on my watch.

The situation

I bought my domain on Name.com. There were some helpful resources on Name.com for email forwarding but if you’re not using name.com’s DNS, this doesn’t work. Did I mention that I moved my fancy new domain to Netlify because my site is hosted there? Netlify has some helpful guides but, they state that Netlify doesn’t provide a forwarding service. I wanted to set this up using “what I had” and really didn’t want to sign up for another service (even if it was free).

I was searching through my mailbox for another non-related task and I stumbled upon an email. It was from ForwardEmail and it stated: Your email was sent successfully. Hmmmmm… I opened it up and apparently, I had set up forwarding on one of my old websites. This was their confirmation email that I set everything up properly. I went ahead and looked up their FAQ’s and found this excellent guide. As far as documentation goes, this was top-notch. It made updating my MX and TXT records on Netlify painless. I added the DNS records as described in the doc, then followed their instructions to set up a “Send Mail As” from gmail. No new services required, whew.

A finishing touch worth pursuing

As I was updating my signature with my new web site, I wasn’t so fond of having @gmail for my contact email. Making this change so I can have both with the same domain really brought a smile to my face. Crazy how something that could seem so insignificant could make such an impact.