2024-11-13

My email alias broke! It was set up fine until Squarespace took over...

The good ol' days

A few years ago, I purchased (leased) websites like my company site and this very one from the deprecated domains.google.com. I used sites.google.com to set up the webpages, and created an alias to utilize my domain names for professional-looking email addresses like "ryan{at}tryanrogers.com" instead of "tryanrogers1{at}gmail.com."

(Side note: Google, I know you're reading this. I really liked domains.google.com, and I'm sad you got rid of it. It was really clean and easy to use, and felt nicely integrated with the rest of the Alphabet internet monopoly.)

Everything was fine, until...

Google (apparently?) sold domains.google.com to Squarespace. I was recently doing some routine web/hosting maintenance, and something got broken. All of the sudden, I was having trouble getting gmail to allow me to use my alias again.

Now, at some point, you're going to run into a pretty strange screen like this (after telling gmail that you want to set up an alias from within the gmail settings and options): 

And here's what you're going to input for each blank (the person in that screenshot was doing it wrong):

• SMTP Server: smtp.gmail.com

• Port: 465

• Username: your GMAIL username, e.g. "bobsaget" if your gmail address is bobsaget@gmail.com

• Password: NOT your gmail or squarespace password! This will be the weird, not-used-anywhere-else password described in the link below. 

• Secured connection using SSL

Credit where credit is due

This solution was already published here. I'm just creating this webpage in the hopes of having the correct solution even more readily-available to people like me-- by putting good information in multiple locations.

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