If you have a Gmail account, you can use it to read e-mail from your account on our servers. There are different ways to use your Gmail account:

• If you only want to use Gmail to view a copy of each incoming message, you can simply forward your email to your Gmail account.
• If you want Gmail to “know” that a certain incoming message came through your email address with us, allowing Gmail to keep it separate and optionally send replies from that address, you can also use the Gmail "mail fetcher" service to have your Gmail account pick up a copy of your email. (We recommend using this in addition to forwarding, because using both avoids delays where messages can take a while to appear in your Gmail mailbox.)
• If you want to be able to send mail from your address using the Gmail interface, you can configure Gmail to send outgoing mail through our servers.

The sections below explain more:

• Forwarding messages to your Gmail account
• Configuring Gmail to fetch mail from your Inbox
• Using Gmail to send messages

Forwarding messages to your Gmail account

This is the easiest method. Simply set up a forwarding address in our control panel to forward messages to your Gmail email address. That's all it takes!

Configuring Gmail to fetch mail from your Inbox

In addition to forwarding, you can also have your Gmail account retrieve your email from a mailbox that you've created on our servers. Doing both has two benefits:

• It makes sure that your Gmail account contains everything in your mailbox with us, even if Gmail rejects the forwarded message
• It makes the messages appear in your Gmail mailbox right away (when the forwarded copy arrives), avoiding a delay before their “fetcher” checks for incoming messages and shows them to you

Gmail will notice and suppress any duplicate messages that arrive both ways, so this is safe to do.

We should also mention that if you also use another mail program (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) to read your mail using the POP3 protocol, you must tell that program to leave mail on the server after the program reads it. If you don't do that, the program may delete the messages before Gmail can read them. Before continuing, make sure that you've set all other mail programs you use to leave a copy of your email messages on the server for at least a short time (a day should be sufficient).

To set this up, follow the instructions on the Gmail “Mail Fetcher” page. Here’s a short description of that process:

First, go to the Gmail settings page (an icon of a gear) and click Accounts and Import, then click Add a mail account:

Enter your email address:

Then click Next. On the second screen, leave “Import emails from my other account (POP3)” checked and click Next again.

On the next screen, Gmail will guess some default settings that are incorrect. You should edit those and use these settings:

• Username: your full email address (all lowercase)
• Password: your email password
• POP Server: mail.tigertech.net
• Port: 995
• Leave a copy of retrieved message on the server: checked
• Always use a secure connection (SSL) when retrieving mail: checked
• Label incoming messages: address@example.com: checked

Don’t check “Archive incoming messages (Skip the Inbox)”.

It should look like this:

Then click Add Account.

By the way, Gmail won’t fetch mail if you have more than 50,000 messages in your Inbox; they’ll show an error saying something like “Too many messages to download”. You can fix this by archiving some Inbox mail into folders.

Using Gmail to send messages

Gmail also allows you to send messages from your email address if you’ve created a mailbox for that address on our servers.

You can only send like this if you have a mailbox on our servers for the address. If an address is merely a forwarding address, you’ll need to also create a mailbox to be able to send from Gmail, even if you don’t ever read the mailbox contents.

Once you’ve created the mailbox on our end, you’ll need to set it up in Gmail. Their Send emails from a different address or alias page has more details about it.

When you do that, Gmail guesses some default settings (such as smtp.example.com) that are incorrect. You should edit those and use these settings:

• SMTP Server: mail.tigertech.net
• Port: 587
• Username: your full email address (all lowercase)
• Password: your email password
• Choose Secured connection using TLS (recommended)

It should look like this screenshot:

Having trouble sending?

We’ve occasionally heard that customers who follow the instructions above see a message saying:

If you see this message, it usually means that example.com or the Gmail account was previously connected to a G Suite (“Google Apps”) account that includes sending restrictions. The “domain administrator” they’re referring to is the administrator of that G Suite Google account, not us. (We can’t fix this for you — it’s a restriction Google has added on their end.)

Google should be able to help with this, but the short version of the solution is that the domain administrator should login at admin.google.com, then choose Apps > Google Apps > Gmail > Advanced Settings > Allow per-user outbound gateways. (However, Google sometimes changes where this setting is located, so you may need to hunt around for it.)