Things that I learnt about hosting.

# Email

A @gmail.com account can be used for sending and receiving emails from a custom domain like @njkevlani.dev. This can either be done using some paid service or for free as well.

To be able to do it for free:

## Receiving Emails

Some domain name service providers provide email forwarding free of cost, like Cloudflare. You can use them to forward all emails on your domain to you personal Gmail account.

If your service provider does not provide this functionality (like GoDaddy, which has paid plans providing integrations with other email providers), then you can use something like https://improvmx.com/. It lets you use their IMPS servers for forwarding emails from your custom domain to service like Gmail. ImproveMX's free plan is generous enough for person/light use cases.

At the end of the day, all these are just IMPS servers, either your DNS provider's or ImproveMX's or someone else's or your own hosted.

## Sending Emails

Gmail allows you to configure additional emails to be used for sending emails.

You can do it from Settings > All Settings > Accounts and Imports > Send mail as.

Fill in details, for SMTP settings, you can use these:

• SMTP Host: smtp.gmail.com
• Port: 587
• Username: Your @gmail email.
• Password: can be generated using the steps mentioned here - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/185833?hl=en.

A verification email will be sent to the email that you with to be used as sender, so you'll need to configure receiving emails first in order to configure this.

## Sending Emails Programmatically

You can use email setup in this way to send emails programmatically as well.

Here is a golang code sample for the same:

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addr := fmt.Sprintf("%s:%s", h.Cfg.SMTPHost, h.Cfg.SMTPPort)
auth := smtp.PlainAuth("", h.Cfg.SMTPUsername, h.Cfg.SMTPPassword, h.Cfg.SMTPHost)

msg := fmt.Appendf(nil, "From: %s <%s>\r\n"+
    "To: %s\r\n"+
    "Subject: Test Email\r\n"+
    "\r\n"+
    "This is an test email to test sending email using custom email via Gamil\r\n", h.Cfg.SMTPSenderName, h.Cfg.SMTPEmail, email)

err := smtp.SendMail(addr, auth, h.Cfg.SMTPEmail, []string{email}, msg)
if err != nil {
    log.Printf("Failed to send email to %s: %v", email, err)
}

• h.Cfg.SMTPUsername is your @gmail address.
• h.Cfg.SMTPPassword is the SMTP password that you generated earlier.
• h.Cfg.SMTPEmail is your email on your custom domain.

Notice that we are using h.Cfg.SMTPEmail twice, in smtp.SendMail, as well as in From header. Without this, the @gmail address is used instead of your custom domain email!