Move from Google Apps–Free Email Options for Your Domain

I was very happy with Google Apps for business for my domain email but with it becoming paid, I started looking for free alternatives to host my domain emails. Please remember this option is for personal as well as business users.

I have switched to Microsoft’s Outlook.com option but here are few of the options which I found out:

Windows Live Admin Center from Microsoft

(https://domains.live.com/)

It allows you to easily configure and manage emails (besides host of other Microsoft services) for your domain. Once you add your domain, you can create up to 50 free accounts.

Step 1:

Login using your windows live account (outlook.com, hotmail.com or create a new one)

Step 2:

Hit the “Add Domain” Button

Step 3:

Enter your domain name and select option to setup outlook.com for your domain. Hit continue

Step 4:

Review settings and accept it (my email blackened in the screenshot above)

Step 5:

It gives you instructions to update your domain MX records (you will need to do it on your hosting provider). This also lets them know that you own the domain. Once you make the changes, click the refresh button and it will check and allow you to add emails of users to your domains.

Some other options are:

1. Zoho Mail: which is ad free for up to 5 business users.
2. Most hosting providers provide their own web client for you to create and access your domain specific emails

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How to Check if an Email Address is Valid and Exists

How do you know if an email address exists or not? The easy option would be that you send a dummy mail to that email address, wait for an hour or so and if your message bounces, it is very likely that the particular email address does not exist. The approach works but wouldn’t it be nice if you could check any email address instantly without even sending that test message?
The other slightly technical option to verify an email address is by querying the mail server. You connect to the mail server through telnet (see video), enter your email address and the other email address that you are trying to verify. If the server response is an error code, the email address is probably not valid.

How to Check Email Addresses Instantly

Let me share an extremely simple method for checking if an email address is valid and exists or not.

Go to the login page of the email service and pretend that you no longer remember the password of your email account. The service will ask for your email address where they can send the password recovery instructions. Here if you enter an email address that does exist, the service is mostly likely to tell you that the particular user name does not exist. I have tested this with Google Apps, Yahoo Mail and Outlook (Hotmail) and the method works with them all.

For Gmail and Google Apps Accounts

Go to Google’s password assistance page at google.com/accounts/recovery and choose the I don’t know my password option. Enter the email address that you are trying to verify – it could be an @gmail address or a Google Apps address – and choose Continue. If that address is not valid, Google will throw an error saying No account found with that email address.

Alternatively, you can go to the Gmail Sign-up page ataccounts.google.com/SignUp and try creating a new Gmail account with the address that you are trying to verify. For valid email address, the error would saySomeone already has that username.

For Outlook, Hotmail and Live.com Addresses

Go to account.live.com/ResetPassword, choose the I forgot my password option and enter the Outlook email address. You will get an error saying The Microsoft account is incorrect. for addresses that do not exist.

For Verifying Yahoo Email Addresses

Go to Yahoo’s account recovery page at edit.yahoo.com/forgot, enter the @yahoo.com email address that you are checking for validity and click the Next button. Yahoo will say We couldn’t match the Yahoo ID you entered with information in our database if the email address does not exist.

Source :- labnol.org

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How to Find the Email Address of a Person

You are sending an email to an old friend but you aren't too sure if the email address that you just entered into the compose window is correct or not?

There are numerous ways to find someone’s email address.

For instance, you may search any old correspondence with that person in your mail archives, use a people search engine (like Pipl), use the WHOIS data of that person’s website or, if nothing works, search for that person’s name on Google (include the @ symbol in quotes) and you may sometimes find their email address in the search results.

How to Find Someone’s Email Address

There’s however a better way. You can guess a few addresses and then use LinkedIn’s Rapportive add-on for Gmail to verify if any of your guesses point to the right person or not.

Go to your Gmail inbox, compose a new message and enter the email address that you have guessed. Now hover your mouse over the address and Rapportive will show a list of various social profiles – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – that are associated with the email address.

If you are to recognize a profile in the social results, you can be pretty much sure that your guess was correct. If no social results are found for that email address, it means either that email address doesn’t exist, or the person doesn’t have a social presence or they could have associated a different email address with their social profiles.

Rapportive is available for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and you’ve to have a Gmail account to use this tool.

Source :- labnol

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