You Control a domain like mydomain.com

• You want [email protected] to be separate & usable apart from any other Email addresses you might have
• Your page/services hosting provider provides you some Email boxes but they get Spam and are not very usable or otherwise unproductive
• You would rather  put the email Via. Google’s GMAIL Email system yet maintain your separate identity and Email addresses .

If you are a registered nonprofit, you can get Google’s G-Suite (Formerly Google Apps) now called Google Workspace (2024)  to do all this for free otherwise it’s not free

If you already have a Gmail account, follow these instructions.
If not, it’s worth creating one just for the Project.
No other Email system I have found is as secure & reliable, and as spam-free  as Gmail for handling Email.
In particular, flavors of Hotmail (Live.Com, Outlook.com, MSN.com) are to be AVOIDED as is- and especially– Yahoo.com and its derivatives  SbcGlobal.Net, att.com etc. are to be Studiously Avoided

• CHECK your domain is actually registered and working, if it’s New. IE http://www.mydomain.com in a Web Browser like FireFox (This one is JUST an EXAMPLE!)
• Problems? see if your domain is properly registered here:
• Visit your Domain Control Panel- This could be CPANEL, PLESK, etc. at this Domain Names Database called WHOIS 
• Look for its Email Forwarding options. Ideally, you will NOT be using any of the provided local mailboxes, only forwards.
• Let’s suppose you have  gmail account [email protected]. be SURE you can see its Emails NOW
• Set a Forward from  [email protected] TO [email protected]
• Save or otherwise Commit this change.
• Log in to http://www.gmail.com as your “ilovethis” Account.
  Send an email to [email protected] and it should show up BACK in your Inbox within a few minutes at [email protected].
• The TO line should show it was sent To:  [email protected]
• Some domain systems can take up to THIRTY MINUTES to commit the change you asked for. Unusual, but possible. Normally it’s instantaneous. This is nothing directly to do with DNS propagation in case anyone says it is : )
• If you Reply now, it will not go out as [email protected] but as [email protected] This is because Google Mail wants you to buy their Workspace Service so will NOT allow you to send as anythign except their free account and will re write your outbound message through their Free account….
• Here’s how to Fix it. Don’t Use the free GMAIL Set Outbound server
• Use the SMTP server provided by your domain host or any other for that matter. They are unlikely to try Changing your outbound Email identity even if not the same as the one your Authenticated to the SMTP server with…..
• Your ISP (Internet Provider) usually gives you a free Email account which though generally useless and insecure DO provide a validating SMTP server that IS okay. Usually. : )
• This last step is far trickier and I will not go into it here… Suffice to say do not mess with your mail account here– do it with a secondary test account FIRST