I recently purchased a godaddy shared web hosting, and although the godaddy configuration tools are way more than I expected for a shared hosting plan (I especially love the ssh access to my account) I’ve run into some issues when I wanted more from their email support.  Basically you have 100MB storage space, but for each email you create you have to allocate an amount of space. Assigning 10MB of storage for an email address is something I find normal, but this limits me to max 10 email addresses. And more, it may happen that one email address rapidly consumes the 10MB allocated, while others stay at almost zero. This means manual reconfiguration of the allocated space for my email addresses. The other big issue is the lack of imap support.

But thanks to this post – http://mike-thomson.com/blog/?p=30 – I find out that the Google emailing capabilities can be combined with my godaddy hosting account. Basically the Google servers will be used for emailing, I get imap support, I benefit of the 7GB of storage, and the most important thing, the email boxes will use the same shared 7GB storage space.

As soon as I’ve completed the steps required by Google Apps, I hit a small issue: sending emails via a 3rd party smtp server is not possible when having a shared hosting plan. This is not a major issue, as you can still use the godaddy relay server (relay-hosting.secureserver.net), but you won’t have those emails in your gmail account. A simple workaround for this is to add a bcc entry with the sender address, this way the email is also delivered into your gmail account.  And if you’d like having that email into the “Sent Mail” folder instead of Inbox, just remove the “Inbox” label from that email (the email is already placed into the sent folder, removing the label keeps things clean).