1and1 domain, Heroku hosting - how to set up email?

Question

I just purchased a domain name from 1and1 and set the cname to point to my app on heroku. However, I want to have an email [email protected]. Do I need to do this via 1and1 or heroku, and how do I go about it?

Answer 1

This is more of a Super User question.

The nutshell answer is that if you own the domain, you can run mail wherever you want—just set the MX DNS record to point at whatever server you want to handle mail for you. In general, though, you don't want to run mail, because it's a huge headache and it comes with responsibilities you probably don't want to have (as evidenced by your asking this on Stack Overflow, not Super User or Server Fault). So really you have two options:

1. Run mail yourself
2. Let someone else run mail for you

I don't recommend #1, but if you want to, I think you'll have more luck running it on 1and1. I have a friend who ran mail on his VPS on 1and1 for about four years before switching providers. So if that's what you want to do, read up on Postfix and install it on 1and1, set your MX to point to that server.

It doesn't look to me like you can run mail on Heroku, but I'm far from an expert on that.

Option #2, which I recommend, is to let someone else deal with it. For example, Google Apps will do this, and if you're a non-profit, you can get it for free. That's free Gmail, which I consider an upgrade from the kind of mail I can provide myself. I also ran into this SendGrid service, which seems to have detailed (albeit long) instructions for integrating with a Rails app on Heroku.