Oliver Nassar

Using Zoho Mail as an alternative too Google Apps (Gmail)

March 03, 2013

When Google announced that they were ending their free Google Apps tier, it left me wondering what I would do to get domain email hosting without setting up my own SMTP server.

In short, their free tier allowed me to setup up to, I believe, 5 email addresses under a domain I owned, at no cost. I found out that Zoho's mail service had a free tier. While slightly limited and a little confusing to navigate, it met the bare bones functionality I was looking for: email hosting that I didn't have to setup on my own server, with the ability to access it from my personalized Gmail account.

There were a few difficulties, but it works.
In addition, I found out how to link a generic email that is hosted through Zoho Mail to my desk.com account, and thought I would list the settings required for this (as it took me a little fiddling around).

Once you've setup your desk.com account, and have added a Mailbox to your account's Channels (http://i.imgur.com/tBmVFGl.png), use the following relative settings:

Mailbox Type: IMAPS
Host: imap.zoho.com
Port: 993

That made it click for me.