Samad’s Blog

I register my domains through GoDaddy.com. Lately a lot of my e-mails have been bouncing, so I thought I would finally get off my lazy ass and implement an SPF record. For those who don’t know, an SPF record is basically just a verification stamp that the e-mail address is valid at the domain its being sent from. Anyway, most of my domains I can control through my private hosting setup. Only one domain can’t be controlled through it, because I don’t host that on the same server as my other sites (its a Googlepages site at a domain). All my e-mail is hosted using Google Apps For Your Domain, and their SPF page is here.

For DNS management on that domain, I have to use GoDaddy.com. I’m thinking “no biggie, it should be the same way I did it on these.” WRONG! GoDaddy created an interface, which ended up screwing everything up even more because I had no idea what was going on. I would think that at least they would have a place where someone could manually type in the record, but they don’t even have that. Luckily while searching on Google I stumbled upon this post which described it in its entirety and cleared up my confusion. Below is a quote of the steps that need to be taken.

1. Login, and go to the “Total DNS Control Panel”
2. Under the TXT section, click “Add SPF Record”
3. Select “An ISP or other mail provider” and click OK
4. Select the “Outsourced” tab, and enter aspmx.googlemail.com as the outsourced domain
5. Click OK
6. GoDaddy will display a confirmation with the correct SPF record listed.
7. Click OK

And that’s it! When you click OK, it will generate what the SPF record will look like - it should look like this: v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Once it looks like that, simply wait and it will propogate through the system. Now you have an SPF record for that domain!

So Gmail recently rolled out with an IMAP service, and knowing some of the benefits of IMAP compared to POP I decided to switch over. I set everything up using Google’s guide for IMAP on WM6 to the word. However, I ran into issues as soon as the first Send/Receive action completed. For some reason, only the headers were downloading!! I didn’t think much of it, and since its a new service from Gmail I thought I might give it a few days for them to sort out the kinks and try again. Now I’m back on POP access.

But curiosity is never more than a hop, skip, and jump away.. and I wanted to see if I was the only one with these issues. Seems like I’m not. And here. Especially considering that the e-mail that was downloaded was all HTML based. So it definitely is a kink in Google’s system.. which will hopefully be sorted out soon (since they did state that they were “working on it”).

Hopefully it won’t be too long before I can finally use labels on my WM device!