Nick Carroll

I really wish that I found this posting in the Joyent Forums earlier. It tells you how to set up email and web domain aliasing to your Joyent account.

I purchased a Mixed Grill bundle from TextDrive which included hosting, online storage for secure backups, and Joyent collaboration applications. To access your joyent applications you have to go to http://username.joyent.net, and your resulting email address would be username@username.joyent.net, which to me doesn’t look that great.

So I came across the above forum posting which shows you how to set up an alias for username.joyent.net, so that you can access your joyent applications from home.yourdomain.tld, and your emails will be username@yourdomain.tld.

If your hosting is with TextDrive, then all you need to do is submit a ticket requesting that they add an MX entry for smtp.joyent.net, and a CNAME entry for home.yourdomain.com that points to username.joyent.net.

You then have to go to your Joyent Customer Control Panel and click on the Domains tab. This allows you to add a web domain and an email domain. Your web domain will be home.yourdomain.com, and your email domain is yourdomain.com. You should also select the “this is the primary domain” option.

Finally, make sure that the email aliases set up for yourdomain.com in your TextDrive webmin match the usernames of the users in your Joyent account.

All this means I can finally make use of my massive Joyent quota, which is about 50 times bigger than my Gmail account!

The other advantage of using the Joyent account is that it has IMAP, which Gmail doesn’t have. So I can access my email not only from an ajax web application, but also from a desktop mail client. The settings for your IMAP client are:

imap server: imap.joyent.net
smtp server: smtp.joyent.net
username: yourname@yourdomain.joyent.net

The Mixed Grill specials at TextDrive apparently end on 15 January 2007. If you are looking for great hosting, service, generous quotas, and a friendly community, then I highly recommend TextDrive.