Gmail for schinckel.net

I have my own domain name, schinckel.net, which is registered with MyDomain.com, and has several sub-domains, which are mainly shortcuts to other sites I manage. Including this one. I also use their email forwarding service, and have it forwarded to my Gmail account. Which is pretty good, but occasionally they have a glitch, and email doesn’t get through, or is delivered late - in some cases up to a week late. This is usually not a big issue for me, as most of my email contact is not urgent (I tend not to use it for business or work purposes), however for my partner it is a real issue. Having a reliable MX server is important for her. I’ve also recently been accepted into the Gmail for Domains programme beta, and am going through the process of setting this up. I won’t create a tutorial - if you don’t know enough about how to do this, I’m not going to try to help you out for free, but I will detail some of the issues I have come across. The first account you create will be the admin account. I set this up as an admin@ address, and then decided I wanted a matt@ address also. I then deleted this, and created a pointer from matt@ to admin@. Later, I decided I would recreate the matt@ address, and use a seperate account for admin related email, even though I will have my email client check both accounts. But, I get the error:

We were unable to create matt@schinckel.net as a new account because you recently deleted an account with the same username. If you or one of your users needs to receive mail at this address, you can create matt@schinckel.net as an email list or nickname.

The Read More page then indicates:

I deleted a user, and would like to recycle the username. What are my options? There are a couple of things you can do if you’d like to recycle a deleted username.

  • Create an email list with that username immediately.
  • Wait five days, and create a new user with the deleted username.

Guess I won’t be going live for another 5 days… The other main issue I am having at the moment is with account creation. Sometimes (rarely) it works, but mostly I get the following error:

Failed to create account! Service is unavailable, please try again later

I’ve also set up a URL forwarding, so that mail.schinckel.net points at the right location on the gmail servers. This is seeming to take a while to propagate, but it will make it much easier for other users.