In Part I we have setup web hosting for multisite wordpress for blogs. In this part we will setup email hosting.
In old days where VPS hosting with cPanel is main stream, we don’t need email hosting at all as they are usually provided together in bundle. But now I need to look for email hosting for customised domains. The most popular ones are – of course giants like google workspace and MS office 365 (for business). They are, however, more than just email hosting but more like whole business app suite. There are some popular email hosting too like ZohoMail, but the charge is still quite high. All I need is a simple mail hosting allow me to have email on my own domains, and then I will use my Gmail to fetch them and delete from server. In this case storage is not a concern either.
In the end I found out my domain registrar namecheap provides private mail hosting too, and with a very good price. As of written, the cheapest tier is only $0.84 per month, with any additional mailbox at $0.41 per month. So I signed up from here.
Once signed up, there are some very nice guide documents on welcome emails. A few things to setup here:
DNS Records
This can be found in welcome email, or follow the link https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/1340/2176/namecheap-private-email-records-for-domains-with-thirdparty-dns/ to setup on Lightsail.
The only issue I had encountered is with DKIM key as there is 255 text length limit on lightsail. However this is not a problem, simply put a new line break (Enter key) in between DKIM value to make each line below 255 text. And once setup is done this can be verified from https://mxtoolbox.com/dkim.aspx to make sure the value is valid.
Gmail Fetcher/Desktop/Mobile setup
Again this is in welcome email or can be found on https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/subcategory/2175/private-email-client-setup/
WordPress SMTP plugin
WordPress has its SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP) installed by default. Just need to enable it and follow setup from previous section and that’s it.