I use Google Apps with almost all my domains as I signed up with most of my domains for the free service. I also planned to signup the remaining ones, but by then Google had closed the service and I could not do anything apart from repenting. Still, its fun to create and manage users for the Domains that are using the free version of Google Apps. There are few domains owner by me, which I use for email communication as I don't give my personal email address to all or anyone meeting around.
If there are no active users for my domain name to provide an email address, I use the domain to avoid and catch spam. There is a feature of catch-all in email servers and Google also provides the same. If I need to give someone an email address to communicate then I give theirname@mydomain.com (quite impressive for them, isn't it?) so that they can send the email without remembering longer email addresses.
This is also a good way of marketing the domain, just in case you are struggling for traffic. This way, you can also track out what all companies leak your email address, rather sell your email addresses even though they promise on their homepage that they don't sell your email address. Lets say there are 3 companies A, B & C then you can give different email addresses to them. If you get any email on an email which was provided to company A but that message is not from company A then it could be possible that there is a data leakage from company A or their data is not secure.
If you are also a Google Apps user and would like to know the procedure to create a catch-all email address for your domain, be it for any use then follow the steps mentioned below:
1) Sign in to your Google Apps account using the domain administrator credentials and click on Apps as shown below:
2) Click on Google Apps in Apps settings:
3) Click on Gmail under services:
4) Scroll down the page of settings for Gmail and click on Advanced settings as shown below:
5) At the end of advanced settings page, you will see Routing option and under which you can enable the catch-all email address by selecting the check box "forward the email to" and then use the desired email address. Make sure that you have created a user account for the email address that you would like to provide in this step. I have used "forwarder@expertsgalaxy.com" user account as shown below:
Congratulations! All set and now you can also give anyone an email address like anyone@yourdomain.com to communicate. If someone asks my email address to send a document then I give such forwarder address so that they shouldn't get my actual email address. Anytime, I think if I am getting spammed then I disable email catch-all feature by reverting the changes we did in above step. Select the discard the email check box and you won't get any email for all those provided email addresses which you provided to known or unknown people.
I setup my first forwarder long time back and still Google hasn't updated the article to set the same. They instruct to click on User Settings, which is now same to Advanced settings. However, as far as I remember, earlier there were no such option which I could find in user settings and used the above mentioned procedure to set one for my domain.
Anyways, finally you know the procedure which can be applied to your free Google Apps account as well. Would you like to share more tips like this? Feel free to use the comment form and if its worth sharing then I will share with all the readers.