As nearly as I can tell, I’m about the only person in North America who isn’t on Facebook. (Evidently all three of my brothers have joined – though apparently none of them are fully aware of the others’ presence yet.) But I have gone and joined a different cult — I now have a Google Android-based telephone (the T-Mobile G-1).
For me, one of the most appealing parts of the Android phone is the way it integrates your phone book and calendar with Google’s contact manager (built into GMail) and calendar. That’s a fairly killer application for me in that it makes everything a whole lot more portable. The only problem is, GMail isn’t my primary means of contact. I’ve had my Dactylmanor address for more than eight years and prefer to use that one.
GMail offers a partial solution to this in that you can set it up to send messages from another address. The down side to this is that messages go out saying they’re from the GMail address on behalf of the Dactylmanor one. So when other people see it (primarily folks who are using GMail as their main address), they tend to capture the GMail address in their contact lists. If they then write to me at GMail instead of Dactylmanor, it could be a while before I see it.
Being forced to move to GMail as my primary email address would have been a deal-breaker for me. A lot of people know to contact me through Dactylmanor and I really don’t want to deal with managing two addresses. (It’s been more than four years since I got rid of my landline phone, but I still occasionally hear about people calling the old number.)
So I went looking to see if there was a way to get an Android to work with non GMail address. One of the free services Google makes available is “Google Apps for Your Domain“; essentially, they provide a version of GMail, Calendar and their online Documents and Spreadsheet tools that work with a domain name you own. (For example, dactylmanor.org!) I figured that would be my best bet.
The first stop in my investigation was a thread on the Android Community Forums where someone was asking the exact same question I was: Does Android work with Google Apps for Your Domain?
And the answer is a resounding yes. Brilliant! (Apparently Google didn’t plan to do this, but later changed their minds.)
The first thing you have to do is setup your email to go to Google’s mail server. The instructions for that show up in the administration panel when you activate the email system. It’s mildly tedious, but fairly straightforward. You do need to have the ability to set custom records in your domain’s DNS server. (Pair makes this fairly simple.)
When I’m at home, I prefer to use Mozilla Thunderbird for my email rather than Google’s web interface. Setting up a desktop email client is also fairly simple, though given the number of them in existence, it’s not possible to document the step-by-step for every system out there. Google’s instructions provide the basic information for server settings, plus a double-handful of the most common clients.
Throw in the Lightning calendar addon for Thunderbird (as well as the provider for Google calendar), and at this point you have something equivalent to Microsoft Outlook, except that along with Windows, you can also run on Mac, Linux and a few other platforms.
Bringing the Android phone into the mix requires that you dig into it’s settings a little (Home Screen | Menu | SD card & phone storage | Factory data reset) and click the button for “Factory data reset.” (Yeah, that step’s a little scary.) When the phone starts up again, when it asks for your Google account, you instead enter an email address and password for your newly Google-hosted email system.
The phone synchronizes its contact list, calendar and email with what’s on Google’s servers and voilà! The Android is now ready to do your bidding.