I recently read an interesting and detailed how-to article on converting your hosted email over to Google. This is actually an idea that I’ve flirted with for some time, but never really got much further than that. This step-by-step instruction set seems pretty straightforward. Google offers a free(!) service that lets you actually host your email (via Gmail) for your domain on their servers, among other services that they offer as well. I keep trying to go over the pros and cons of doing the thing.
Currently, the FT email is provided by my host, and I offer a personalized address to anyone who asks. The majority of the users (I think) only use IMAP via webmail, as opposed to Thunderbird or Outlook or something. But the webmail experience has left me wanting something more. My hosts email feels like a clunky 1998 with SquirrelMail. Even the webmail software I installed myself, Ilohmail, hasn’t been touched in over a year and feels old and dated. The SPAM fight on the hosted email has been mediocre at best. They offer SpamAssassin, but no way to customize it per user. So I’ve found that I have to try and tweak settings to offer the best options to the most people, and if something gets through a lot, I have to be notified about it and try and manually add rules to try and stop it. Plus there’s been a few cases where either emails have been blocked, dropped, or otherwise made difficult to get.
Granted, I’ve become a Gmail-only user, so I may be biased. But with Gmail I get 2.8Gb of space, powerful searching, and an all around a sharp web app. Once you get used to it, threaded conversations and labeled messages instead of folders are really cool. Archiving everything is fun. Advantages I see would be offering that much space to each user (my total hosting package is in the single gigabyte range), better SPAM control (I’ve had really good luck with SPAM when using Gmail; plus I figure with the collective Gmail users training their SPAM filters, it can only get better), and what I think is a better admin interface.
On the other side, I’d be essentially turning over control to Google, for a free service. Do you get what you pay for? I don’t think I’d have an easy way to backup all email myself (as opposed to downloading it all from my host currently). Of course, I don’t do my own backups nearly enough as it is, so I’m at the mercy of my host’s backup system anyhow. Is Google here to stay? What if I wanted to eventually move things from Google to somewhere else? I guess I could say the same about my host, though, too. And you can download your Google hosted email to a mail client like Outlook via POP, just not IMAP.
There would of course be some setup work. I need to make sure I get all of the old mail as well as contacts moved over. Of course, I wouldn’t be removing any of the old setup, so if something didn’t work, I’d just roll back changes and everyone would go back to the old way. But I think it may be better to have things handled by the big guys. What does the collective audience think?
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