It's not that often that you're ending up setting up a new website in your life. It's probably every couple of years, maybe every decade, that you feel the need for some fresh paint. The very same is true for this new site here, cogmodo.

cogmodo stands for "cognition mode" or something along those lines. Here I'm trying to write about my experiences with science and technology, with Apple gear, with automation, with AI. I'm also curious to explore subjects like personal knowledge management (PKM) and the structuring of personal data. Where to write? What to write? And how long? What apps do I use? I hope to combine all these topics under this new, single entity, cogmodo.

So I just want to quickly dive in and shortly write about one of these nasty obstacles whenever you're about to set up a new website with a new name, with new handles, and a new mail address. At least in my case, whenever registering a new domain name, I usually get one of these forwarding mail addresses from my web host. They are perfect for receiving messages but out of the box don't work to send messages out or reply. Usually, these kinds of addresses are a bit cheaper, but they come with the downside that they don't include a new separate mailbox as well. Instead, you're basically creating a forwarding rule from that new address example@yourdomain.com to your existing mailbox somewhere at Google, Fastmail, Yahoo, or elsewhere.

I want to focus here on setting up such a new mail address with your existing Gmail account. All sounds rather easy and straightforward in the beginning, but then there pop up some caveats. So here are mine:

I followed this tutorial provided by Google, and it at least showed me what's possible but not exactly how to get there. So first, you go to the "Settings" page of your Gmail account. In the header, click on "Accounts and import". Scroll down to the "Send mail as" section and click on "Add another email address".

So far, so understandable. You enter your forwarding mail address example@yourdomain.com that you got from or registered at your webhost. Now comes the tricky part. You need to enter the credentials from your SMTP server. Usually, with the most basic website packages, you don't have access to your own SMTP server. So in my case, I instead wanted to use the SMTP server from my Gmail account itself, that is smtp.gmail.com. As I was trying to type in my (correct) login credentials, I always got back an error message. The normal Google credentials just didn't work. And it took me a while to figure out what was going on.

So in short, here's the solution, at least one solution that worked for me. In order to get working credentials for that SMTP server from Gmail, I first needed to switch my whole Google account to the 2FA verification. With 2FA in place, I then needed to create app specific passwords for every device or, in this case, every login type. So I created one of these „app specific" passwords within a dedicated section of my Google account. With the new password I got from there, I went back to the SMTP login mentioned above. And here we are, my Google username in conjunction with the new app specific password worked. I was able to log in successfully.

Now you just need to confirm the new mail address you just registered and voila, you're all set up. You're able to receive and send messages via your shiny new mail address example@yourdomain.com all handled by Gmail and you don't need to pay extra for a mailbox provided by your domain host.