All you need is a forwarding service to forward the incoming mail to your gmail account, as regular personal gmail can handle sending out email with a different from address.
No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use, or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.
I think most people would consider that cheating... You're hardly running your own email server, and still using Google.
I actually miss running my own email domain, the privacy of it, not the actual administration. I stopped when I had gotten so crazy with aliases and disposable addresses that the spam overwhelmed me. Wasn't worth the time to 'do it right,' and I gave up my privacy for the simplicity of GMail.
I would love to leave GMail and take my privacy back, but I haven't found an acceptable alternative yet.
"cheating"? people are claiming that you now need to configure your own smtp server with delivery, spam filtering etc. that's simply not true. most web hosting comes with an smtp server; you likely need web hosting anyway and pointing the smtp server at google is trivial.
i fail to see how making good use of available resources is "cheating". the idea isn't to win some geek hair-shirt contest; it is to get email delivered to your domain.
Seconding this; Gandi works well for me as a registrar, DNS provider, and email provider.
There are many email providers you can use with your own domain. For example, rackspace is $2 a user a month. https://www.rackspace.com/apps/email_hosting/rackspace_email... I'm not sure why people are jumping from "Google won't do this for free for me anymore" to "I must do it myself".
You can take the middle ground; make your own complete mailserver, and have a forwarding GMail or similar account to act as a proxy receiver for forum registration and that sort of thing- services that are much more likely to get your address into the hands of spammers.
It's pretty easy actually but when authorizing GMail to add a new sender address it usually mails a verification code to that address. Which, in this case would come back into the same Gmail inbox.
So if you have a X@Y.Z forwarding to A@gmail.com, then the verification code would be sent by gmail to X@Y.Z, which in turn, due to your forward settings, would redirect all mail to A@gmail.com.
The difference is that when sending mail from your Gmail.com inbox as opposed to the Google apps inbox for X@Y.Z is that when you send a mail via gmail (even if you fake the sender), the signed-by field will contain "gmail.com". On the other hand, Google apps for domains will set the signed-by field value to "Y.Z" (which would be your domain name).
As far as I know, this is the only difference. In Gmail, you can even set the default sender-address as your custom domain address so you don't need to set it everytime you reply to/compose new emails. And, unless you think/feel that signed-by: domain.name is cool, you're not really missing anything.
Using a mail address different from your default Gmail (or Google Apps for Business Mail) address unfortunately does not work for some recipients. It seems that at least some versions of Microsoft Exchange/Outlook always show your default address and not the different mail address you actually used.
For anyone considering it, some MS clients (and a few others) show something like :
myemail@gmail.com on behalf of Rob Aley [me@mydomain.co.uk]
It maybe looks a little unprofessional, but as long as your gmail account isn't something like offensivewords@gmail.com or cutesexyman32@gmail.com, its not too bad.
It is not too bad IMHO if you only use a slightly different domain for the same purpose but with completely different domains, it looks odd. And there is always the problem that some mail clients use your default Gmail address to reply and not the one you actually used.
No exim4, no spamassassin, no clam-av, no figuring out which indexer to use, or any of that. Just a forward on the incoming mail.