Use Google Apps to Create a Personalized Email Address

If you freelance or work at a small company with no email system in place, you'll often find yourself feeling sheepish for telling future business contacts to get in touch with you via your Gmail or Yahoo! account. Now, though, there's a free and easy way to kiss that touch of unprofessionalism goodbye.

Here's what you do: Go to the messaging part of Google Apps and sign up using the correct domain name. (For most of you, that's the personal website you already set up. If your company doesn't have professional email addresses, forward this on to the IT person.) You'll pick the email address you want--for me it was david@davidgoldenberg.com--and then you'll have to go into your domain registrar (mine was Doteasy) and change around some MX values. It sounds complicated, but Google explains what to do well, and it's over quickly.

Some of you might already be using a personalized email address through your domain registrar. If so, you should switch. Your new mail interface will look just like Gmail, and will have the organizational and spam-fighting abilities that mail servers like Doteasy and GoDaddy so desperately lack.

(Thanks, Slashdot commenters!)