I might be a bit slow on the take-up here, but I've recently come across Google Apps and the way it lets you manage your email for your own domain via gmail.

Gmail has some advantages: an excellent spam filter, nice web-mail, pretty reliable, loads of storage space, IMAP access, and it's all free! The best bit though is that you can send all of your email at your domain to gmail. Your email address will still be you@yourdomain.com.

To do this you need to go to http://www.google.com/a/cpanel/domain/new and start the signup process. You must have administrator access to your domain: ie you must have some way of modifying the DNS zone records. If you are with a web host and you are using their nameservers then you will need to contact them to get the changes done. If you are a cPanel reseller you can make the changes yourself, or if your domain is just with a registrar such as GoDaddy, 123Reg etc, and you are still on their DNS servers, you might be able to make the changes through the control panel there. What you will be changing is at least the MX records, and optionally adding a few CNAME records.

When signing up to Google Apps, you create an admin account. You then log in to an administrator control panel to set everything up. If you lost the link to the control panel, go here and click, "Returning user", enter your domain and then choose "manage this domain" from the drop-down.

The first thing to do is to prove to Google that you own the domain name. There are two ways of doing this: adding a CNAME record to domain or by uploading a simple HTML file to the place it tells you. Google then goes away and verifies that you really own the domain. You can carry on setting things up, but you won't be able to send emails from your domain until it is verified - this usually takes a few hours. You can still receive emails during that time.

The next thing to do is to set up emails. You should add user accounts for all email addresses that you want to use. This provides separate logins for each user. If you in fact want aliases so that there are many email addresses all sent to the same inbox you should do it a bit differently. Set up a normal user account, then find the list of users, click on a username, and use the "Add nickname" facility. You can add user accounts at any time: but note that by default any emails at your domain sent to a user that doesn't exist will get discarded. This can be changed by clicking on "Email" on the dashboard.

You also need to activate emails. There is a link that gives you instructions on how to activate. Essentially you need to add MX records to your DNS file. How you do that depends on where your DNS server is. The priority isn't that important as far as the exact numbers go, I found cPanel wouldn't let me use the same priority as in the instructions so I just put in numbers in ascending order. Also it is really important to delete your current MX record - in WHM (cPanel) I thought that I had done it, but then found out I hadn't. You need to make sure you click on the "Delete" button in WHM to do it. Once you have done it make sure you click the button "I have completed these steps" - Google then checks that you have done it correctly.

You can then log into your emails at the web address listed in the control panel. The final bit of magic is that you can change the address - to something such as mail.yourdomain.com, or gmail.yourdomain.com, or anything you like - so that it's easy for you to remember where your webmail access is. To do this you need to again follow the instructions, this time adding a CNAME record. I am not sure the instructions are quite right in google, as it gives a server such as ghs.google.com as the address, and it might need a "." after the end - ie "ghs.google.com." - I put a dot and it works, but not sure if it works without it. You need to tell Google you have done this step again, and it will check your records.

That's all you need to do! You now have 6Gb+ of reliable email storage, spam filtering, web-mail, IMAP, labels, search, the lot!