Alright, so late last year I vowed to cleanup White Lotus Interactive’s website / web presence stuff, which is still in progress. May change this to a general “Updating White Lotus”
White Lotus Interactive has historically had 2 email addresses - info@xingthegame.com, and xingthegame@gmail.com. Back in 2013 it was all the rage / cool / legit to have your own email domain, so naturally with our brilliant xingthegame.com domain hosted by ipage, we decided to start using their mail service as well.
I’m going to back up a second and give a bit of context to my personal relationship with email. I signed up for my first email address on yahoo.com sometime around 2000 (you know, so I could sign into lego.com and whatnot). In 2005 I got that sweet sweet invite to gmail, and netted that awesome 1 gig of storage, a massive upgrade from what I think was around 20 megs on yahoo at the time. So I made a gmail account. By the time I was applying for collage I made another gmail account (gotta look professional and put together! None of this Xx_coolguy_xX@hotmail.com or whatever). Of course I also need a throwaway account - gmail. College gives me a .edu address? gmail. You get the picture.
When it came time to make a company email account, you bet I immediately went with gmail. But how do you get that sweet sweet custom domain name? How does that even work?
Well, back then, I had no idea, and I had absolutely no time to figure it out. Some of ya’ll might be laughing at this notion, but now that I’m reflecting on this, I realize I have literally never interacted with email outside of webmail. To me, email is just another website you log into and have an account with. End of story. I knew that people in the past had emails provided by their ISP (I remember my parents having an @cox.com or whatever it was) and companies had set up private email servers n whatnot, but I had personally had no reason to ever think past “Just open a gmail account”.
One further slight tangent, as a kid I remember it being rough trying to find places online to share, well, anything. I had an angelfire website / account that provided a partly 20 megabytes of storage - not enough to host files of any magnitude (game saves, mp3s, whatever). Keep in mind that this is from the perspective as a penniless 13 year old in the early 2000s, of course. Email is technically just another form of hosting and sharing data.
Back to 2013 setting up my newly founded companies’ email, we elected to more or less click the “Yes I want mail” option from ipage.com. It said it had webmail, cool- this should work no problem.
Unsurprisingly to anyone who has worked with any of this stuff before, it sucked. The web client is extremely pedestrian compared to any proper webmail service, and had a tiny mailbox size to boot. Trying to find a solution quickly (we needed to start sending emails and stuff! You know, business!) I researched how to link up my crappy new email service with gmail.
We had already set up a gmail account for the company, so I saw that you can sorta link the emails? Sorta? I know the technical details now, but back then I remember just trying to setup gmail to recieve mail from our ipage domain, then sending as that domain. Keep in mind, I have absolutely no idea how any of this work.
I managed to get it to work. All the emails from ipage were getting forwarded to our gmail, then gmail could send as our ipage domain. GOOD ENOUGH.
Somehow, we managed to use that for years. So yeah, the obvious problem was there was no way to delete messages off of ipage in gmail since they were just getting forwarded. Oops. Also apparently other mail servers can reject mail being forwarded? Oh. Uh, yeah, we might have straight up missed important emails over the last 13 years. Sorry.
What do
OK, so
From my current understanding, emails are super old school, with a smattering of random hacks on top to try to make it more secure. Whoever controls the domain technically controls EVERYTHING - they can simply point emails to a completely different mail server and bam - no extra authentication needed. Your email account name, password, whatever, only the mailserver cares about this. If someone gets control of the domain then EVERY ADDRESS on that server is bunk. The emails themselves may be secured behind passwords or whatever, but all mail can be rerouted and no one could tell (outside of exotic encryption stuff like proton).
So yeah, you simply set up different MX records on your domain to point to a different mailserver, then tell the mail server how you want it to process requests. Thats it. There isn’t any magic arbiters or transfers or anything. It is that simple.
I honestly feel kinda stupid not knowing this stuff, but it really is a bit arcane compared to the way people use the internet now. Heh, I almost wrote “the web”, but categorically email is not part of the web, now is it?
Anyways, I also read that despite how simple email stuff is, DON’T TRY TO SELF HOST IT. Allegedly there are a number of patched on compilation that make running a proper functional mail server impractical for an individual. So… maybe a future project? I ended up using purelymail.com since they looked mom and pop and had unlimited domains + users n whatnot for 10 bucks a year. They seem fine? I really don’t know.
Then you need a mail client - I’m using Thunderbird because technically free open source and I knew the name before I started with this project. It is fine. It receives and sends emails.