Today's project:
Set up a custom email domain for dim51.

From memory:
I should be able to set something up with Cloudflare. I remember seeing something about email domains several years ago. What I don’t remember is whether it's a forwarding service or an actual email domain.

Inflection:
I know that creating an email server is something people around me have done. I don’t want to use my webserver for too many things, but it might be fun to locally host an email server. Preferably, I’d find a free server.

First step:
I'm going to Cloudflare and poking around their website again. If I find nothing useful, I’ll consult ChatGPT.
After 10 minutes of poking around, I found that they offer a service called Zero Trust Inbox. It looks like a way to scan your inbox for threats. This is new to me, but it sounds like a really good idea. I look forward to a day when all our emails have this sort of protection. I say it that way because you will always have places, like government agencies, that don’t use anything but the simplest and oldest software for communication. If this became standard practice, even the most managed IT systems would eventually have an advanced level of security. Of course, I understand that this service is not free and would require enough server space and processing power to service each email provider. This alone is enough to discourage such development, and of course, this software may have been patented by Cloudflare.

Without making progress on Cloudflare, I’m going to ChatGPT.
Reading into it, I could host my own email server, but there’s a risk of getting blacklisted if I don’t set it up correctly. To avoid spending several days setting it up, like when I built the web server, I’ll explore an option called Zoho. I’ve never heard of them, but it looks like they have a valuable free package for hobbyists—5 users and 5GB per mailbox. That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for. Let’s see how it goes. On a side note, I was right about Cloudflare offering email forwarding, but it doesn’t let me send emails from that address, so it's no use to me right now. I might someday use it for setting up a “help email” or “media contact” email so that I can have several things go into the same inbox. There is only me working on any of this, and I’d rather have all the emails in one place so I don’t have to keep checking different ones. Inwardly, it will be simpler, and outwardly it looks like I have my ducks in a row.

First look at Zoho:
Google says they call themselves a “unique and powerful software suite for businesses of all sizes.” I find this promising. Looking at the landing page, they have several apps that I’d like to remember. Most interesting are the Secure Email Service, Booking, Help Desk software, and a Digital Signature application.

Creating an account:
I have to choose whether I’m here for personal use or as a business. I wonder what’s different between the two. I consider it for personal use, but they might not give me the free email option ChatGPT mentioned if I select that. So, I’ll proceed as the CEO of Dimension51. Just a simple email verification, and I’m in!
Right away, I’m hit with the billing page. Good. I’m actually really happy with their prices. $1.25 per month per user if I ever grow to the point where I need more users? That seems very reasonable. At the bottom of the page, I see the free option. It says “Up to 5 users, 5GB/user, 25MB attachment limit.” I can live with that. This will save me a lot of trouble if it works. I’m disappointed to have to manage another email, remembering its password, and making the mental note to check it often, but I feel that’s a "me" problem.

Clicking the free option, it’s asking for an existing domain or if I want to buy a new one. I need to read into this because in my mind, I should have everything I need with dim51. It looks like the web domain is what it wants, thankfully. I had to give it my organization name. So it’s official, my organization is Dimension51.com. I registered its industry as “Art, Architecture & Design” because that feels like the most personal description in the given list. There’s an option for “Other Orgs & Services,” but I like to imagine that this website is less about tech and IT and more about what’s interesting. That could be art, and very well may be someday. I will always be interested in IT, but only time will tell how this website develops.

Now, it requires me to prove I own this domain.
It wants to attach a CNAME record in my DNS provider. It’s offering to do it automatically or to let me do it manually. I feel like I should do it manually since it’s asking for my DNS login info, but I really want a simple solution, and if it will do it automatically, that seems simple enough for me.

That was VERY easy. A popup appeared asking for confirmation. My Cloudflare was already logged in because I have it set to remember this device, and I just needed to click one button to confirm. Just like that, 5 seconds of loading, and Zoho is asking me for the email address I’d like to make. So, I’ll make DavidH@dim51.com. It’s also prompting me, saying, “You are the Super Administrator of this organization.” Very cool.

With that, I’m in and poking around. I found that I can already set up my email signature, so I made sure to say thank you, my name, and tag as CEO of Dimension51.com. That feels strange, but I’ll get used to it. Proceeding with setup, it wants me to set up User Groups, but I have no use for this, so I’m skipping it. They recommend it to “avoid clutter.” That shouldn’t be a problem.
It had a second chance to authenticate my DNS service, and I found it very nerve-racking. It told me everything it wanted to change, and I understood very little of it. Long story short, there were several settings it wanted to change over to Zoho’s pointing settings, which would knock the website down for a short time. I didn’t want to do this because I’d have almost no way of getting the settings back if Zoho stopped working for some reason. When I hit login again, it previewed all the changes. I got intimidated and hit cancel because the original prompt said, “You may have already confirmed,” and I wanted to explore that. When I hit cancel, it seemed to refresh something and gave me a “confirmed” message like I had actually gone through with the change. Relieved, I’m moving on and skipping the prompt asking if I want to migrate an email. I’ll be starting with this one, not a Gmail, so I don’t have anything to migrate, thankfully. They prompted me, informing me that they have a mobile app, so I downloaded it and continued.

Ok, after testing the email, I can send messages from it, but I cannot receive emails. This is strange. I receive a Mailer Daemon notification saying “Access Denied” when I try to send it a message. I tried twice, so now I’ll start Googling.

Turns out, it’s because of that second round of verification I opted out of. I needed it set up that way for the long run, not just for confirmation. Ok, time to backtrack and fix that mistake. I hope Zoho still feels like doing it automatically for me; that would make this a lot easier.

After doing some digging, I had to activate a Zoho tool called Zoho Directory. Then I found the place to add a new domain, but I couldn’t re-verify my existing domain. I haven’t reached out to customer service via their live chat option. I explained myself and was given a simple, “Checking.”

They told me that they couldn’t help me because they’re not the right department and then gave me the email of the team I needed. I’m going to try to do it manually because I hate waiting for IT to respond to emails.After digging, I found the MX entries on their website.

ChatGPT says that I won’t need the old settings as long as I stay with Zoho. I was worried I’d have to change them back at some point and scramble to find the old settings.

After deleting 2 MX settings and converting the other 3,

Original Settings.

New Settings

now I wait.
I’ll run this post through ChatGPT to check grammar and spelling, then post it for now. It says it will take up to 48 hours for the change to propagate across the world. Until then, my email won’t work.

UPDATE!

It worked within an hour. I'm so happy to all this project complete.