Google Apps For Your Domain
I’ve been trying out Google Apps for Your Domain with one of my websites for awhile and have to say I’m impressed. The service currently offers you GMail, Google Calendar, and a few other tools with your own domain. After a fairly easy verification process and setup (you need to change your MX records) you’re ready to go.
My initial hesitation was that they only allow POP email access and not IMAP, however, the webmail client can be set to archive mail retrieved by POP—basically dumping it into a searchable folder. Also, if you send an email from the webmail client it will be downloaded for you to move into your sent items locally. The transition wasn’t too hard, but I would like to see IMAP support eventually.
While you can import your contacts into your address book, there is no way to easily import your existing mail. I did, however, find a Python script called GMail Loader that sends your existing mail to your new account. If you use Mac OS X you will need to convert your email into mbox format before using GMail Loader. It takes awhile depending on how many messages you have, but once you are done you’ll want to click the webmail setting “Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on” when you are done so you don’t re-download all your mail when you use POP next time.
GMail works pretty well once you get it set up properly. I have found one minor annoyance though: If you send an email to yourself it will appear in the webmail, but can not be downloaded through POP. I have a habit of doing this for personal notes unfortunately. I imagine their logic is you have a copy of it in your sent items already so you don’t need it again.
Setting their email up is probably the big thing for most people. The Google calendar works as expected: has support for multiple calendars, can send email and SMS text message reminders, and can sync with iCAL and XML (both requiring you to have your calendar published online somewhere). You cannot edit synced calendars, but you can always create another calendar in Google and have say, iCal, sync with that.
There are other services you can enable, including a start page and chat, but I have not experimented with them to date. For the domain that they’re on, the Apps have gone over favorably and I am looking forward to seeing what else gets integrated in the future.
