Receive and send mails from own domain via Gmail?

Question

I have an own domain example.com. Currently I receive mails through [e-mail] because my current host has the ability to forward all mails from [e-mail] to [e-mail]

I will move example.com soon and not install a mailserver at all. A contact form sends mails via mandrill to [e-mail].

I want to be able to receive these mails in Googlemail (like I'm used to) and be able to respond to them using [e-mail].

What's the easiest way to accomplish that? Just set the MX-record of example.com to one of Google's mailserver?

Answer 1

Just sending the MX records wouldn't do much. The mail servers don't know that they should accept mail for that domain, much less deliver that mail to some specific inbox – they need to be configured first.

Gmail on your own domain is called "Google Apps", which you can sign up for at $5/month if you only need one user account. (There used to be a free option, bit it is no longer available.)

Answer 2

Google allows you to send email from different addresses. This requires a mail server somewhere though. You can forward your work email to a Gmail account, and then send email from Gmail using your work account. You can read up more about this here.

If you don't have a primary mail server, you can use Google Apps for Business. The basic plan starts at $5 per month per user. It gives you access to 30 GB of storage for your Google Products.