Google Apps for Email

[jmihawkins]

Since Gmail is now up to 6.5g of free email, it's looking like a pretty good alternative to some of the other things I've been playing with - especially since I dont want to be a postmaster, let alone give up 20g storage just to process email (the entire site only uses 90mb).
I've messed around with it a coupla days now, and can get it to do 90-98% of what I want, just by letting it do the 'Mail Fetch' thing from FQ.
But the info about Google Apps looks real enticing... but I'm concerned about modifying the MX records to point to them, especially since I'm only looking at the Standard Edition (for now), and I know that support will just go out the window.
I dont really care about any of the other features of Apps, tho that may change over time.
Does anyone here have experience with using Google Apps for email, in particular the Standard Edition?

[ryount]

Been using it for my own domain and one at work with about 15 users for about 6 months. I don't really have any complaints, I haven't had to contact support and there has been no downtime that I have noticed. Most of our users use Outlook instead of the web interface. The spam filtering is really nice and there has been very few false positives. One thing that I wish you could do would be to selectively upgrade some users to the paid version, but it's either the whole domain or none.

[jmihawkins]

Thankyou for the reply. I think my biggest concern is actually personal, the fact that by changing my MX records I'd be delivering some aspect of control over my website (that I dont really even care about) to an entity other than FQ - I just want reliable email, that refelects my @example.com, and has nothing to do with AOL.

I know google had email problems back in early 2007, but everybody does - servers crash, get overloaded, etc - fact of life. They do offer the 'uptime guarantee' for paid (and the 25g is real enticing for 2 of my intended users, and for $200/year I could upgrade all 4 id's), but I understand that guarantee is really only best effort.

I'm looking for opinions or experience reports from users who've dealt with the process and the product, before I make what I think of as 'a big-leap' into unknown territory.

You've helped - thankyou. :smile:

[shatty925]

Been using it for my own domain and one at work with about 15 users for about 6 months.

I've been thinking about using their apps for email, but I can't get past one concern:

* is there a way for users to check their spam folder other than logging into the web version?

[ryount]

If you use IMAP you can synch the spam folder.

[etocaj]

I too have been thinking about a google apps switch over. One thing that seems like it might be a problem is not having access to change CNAME entries in order to setup:

mail.mydomain.com
calendar.mydomain.com
etc.
etc.

Creating these subdomains allows you to point to a particular google app so you don't have to enter a long url, such as this:

www.google.com/calendar/a/your_domain.com


So, depending on how many you setup, you'll be forking down some cash at $15 a pop, plus the MX change fee of $15. Not a real big deal, but after a while things add up.

[ryount]

I always go to my email and then click the links to the calendar and other stuff anyway. Also, if you want an SSL connection to your email you will want to use the long URLs or point the subdomain to another directory and use .htaccess to redirect. I think FQ calls that a DS-IRM.