Reference Links
- About LuxSci's Google Email Relaying Service
- Secure Connector at LuxSci
- Written instructions and more details, see the LuxSci member's help article: Outbound email sending from Google.
- LuxSci member's SPF help
- LuxSci member's DKIM setup help
Video Transcript
This tutorial is going to show you how to set up Google to relay your outbound email through LuxSci. There are only three steps in doing this. In the first step, you're going to log into LuxSci, create all of your users, and enable smart hosting. In your second step, you'll set up SPF and DKIM so that everyone knows that your email is supposed to be relayed through LuxSci. In the third step, we'll log into Google Apps and configure smart hosting through LuxSci.
Step 1: Configuring LuxSci
Step one. You log into LuxSci as an account administrator. Then you go to your "account administration" area. Go into "email settings". Then here, you can choose smart hosting. Here will enable smart hosting from Google Apps. Save changes. This updates your account so that it will accept email from Google's servers and allow that to be relayed outbound. You could similarly enable this on a per domain basis if you had more specific configuration requirements.
Next, we're going to create the users in your LuxSci account. You go under "users". You can create them individually or in bulk. You can specify how many users you want to create. Next step. Here you can easily enter the names and addresses and passwords for all the users on LuxSci. You can also upload a CSV file with all of their information, or you can create them individually if you need it.
The reason that you must create all of these users individually is that LuxSci validates all the messages sent from Google Apps based on the from address of those messages and there must be a one-to-one correspondence. For every from address used in your Google Apps account or every Google user you have, you must have an existing user on LuxSci. Each of these users have separate settings, separate reports, separate tracking, separate authentication, etc. This is a necessary first step. If later on you create more users in Google, you'll need to create these additional users in LuxSci for their email to be relayed properly.
Step 2: SPF and DKIM DNS Records
For step two, we're going to update your domain's DNS so that all of your email recipients expect email to come from LuxSci. The first step is to add a TXT record to your DNS to specify via SPF the fact that LuxSci is an authorized sending server for your emails. This is done by adding this SPF record to your DNS (v=spf1 include:luxsci.com ~all) or by adding the include:luxsci.com into your existing SPF record.
The second thing that we're going to do is we're going to add DKIM. Go under "administration" in LuxSci. Go under "DKIM". We're going to add a new DKIM definition. You can put your domain name in here and give a DKIM selector, which you can just use DKIM, unless you've already used that for some other company like LuxSci. Create the definition. These get populated in LuxSci so that LuxSci can start signing all messages sent through it with DKIM.
In order to make this take effect, you're going to need to go into your DNS and add these three TXT records. This one, this one, and this one. If you already have DKIM, then you're going to already have a domain key in an ADSP record, so you can probably keep those as is. You're only going to need to add the one new record, which contains the public key for LuxSci's DKIM configuration. If LuxSci manages your account's DNS for you, you can just click the "make support request" button and that will make a support ticket automatically and LuxSci will go ahead and update your DNS with all of the appropriate settings for you.
Step 3: Configure Google Apps for Smart Hosting
For step three, we log into your Google account. We go into "apps", then "G Suite", and then "Gmail". Wait. We scroll down to "advanced settings". Then we scroll down, once it finishes loading, all the way down to a place where we can enable our outbound email server for smart hosting. Here, under "routing", "outbound email gateway", you enter the outbound email server provided to you by LuxSci. Different accounts will have different outbound email servers. See your help for specific instructions. In the case of this example, I'm going to enter email32.luxsci.com. Yours could be something completely different, like email957.luxsci.com. You do this, you hit "save", and you note that it may take up to an hour for your changes to actually propagate in Google and for email to start being relayed.
All Set!
That's it. Once these changes take place and they propagate, emails sent by your Google Apps users will be automatically relayed through this LuxSci server and outbound into the internet. You can tell if it's happening properly by looking into your LuxSci email sending reports and seeing the activity there. You can in fact track delivery of your messages to your recipients through LuxSci.
