Google for Domains - Wow!

I posted a blog about using Gmail back in April. I’ve taken that one step further, and started using Google for Domains. I've been telling my geek friends about it, and basically they all have said to me "Calm down, you're totally spazzed-out!" I get excited about these kinds of things, what can I say?

Google for Domains is part of the Google Apps family (Google Docs, Google Calendar, etc) and it's basically free email hosting for your own domain name. Sign up, verify that you own the domain name, and you can start adding up to 100 email accounts of your very own. I’m talking about full-featured email hosting OF YOUR OWN here; this is not the same as signing up for a freebie yahoo or hotmail account. If your business has its own domain name such as myownbusinessname.com, Google will host email for it.

My email for vin@keystonewebs.com is actually hosted at Google. Previously, my domain email was hosted on my own server using mail server software. Now, Google and its quadrillion-dollar data centers located around the world take care of it. It’s totally transparent to those I communicate with - Google doesn’t add any links or ads to messages I send, and all email I send appears to others to come from my own domain just as before.

What a FANTASTIC mail hosting solution. For starters, it features a robust control panel for administrating things like user passwords, out-of-office replies, forwards, “nicknames” or alternate email addresses, catch-all accounts, and so on. If you’ve ever worked at an organization that used Microsoft Outlook with an Exchange server, or are familiar with Outlook Web Access, you’ll appreciate how nifty these features are. Oh, and Google for Domains also uses the Gmail anti-spam engine, too. That was a biggie for me. I didn’t want my Web server polluted with so much spam traffic. Now it’s all offloaded to Google. I think it even does a better job than the Barracuda firewall which my mail server was previously sitting behind.


Some of the admin area controls for an email account.

On the email side, it’s built on the Gmail engine, so you can check your domain email over the Web as well as configure a standard email program such as Outlook, Apple Mail, or Entourage to access your mail via POP3 or IMAP. You can also have Gmail pull in mail from other, external email accounts in the manner I discussed in that April post. The real beauty for me is that no matter where I sign-in, I have access to the same inbox, the same sent-messages folder, and the same deleted items. It’s not like POP3, where once you download something to one computer, it’s no longer available on others computers you use. This is great for me, because I’m a heavy email user who works from a variety of computers.


Composing a new message.

Setting it up was fairly straightforward, although still not for beginners. You have to establish your business or organization account first, and set up the same email accounts you already have on your current mail host. This step helps ensure that no mail gets lost during the transition. Next, Google will ask you to perform a few task that helps it verify that you’re the actual owner of the domain and authorized to do this. You’ll place a simple HTML file on your Web site with a particular name and piece of text provided by Google. Click the “I’ve done this - verify now” button, and Google will check the site to see if the page shows up. If it does, you’re good to go.

The second and perhaps more complicated step for some is to update your MX records. MX records are used for mail traffic, telling mail servers where mail for keystonewebs.com is supposed to go, for example. Google provides six MX entries you can make for your domain, which is great. With my previous setup, I only had one mail server. Google’s got a bunch, clustered and configured for failover, and that is sure to make things faster and more reliable.

The whole process, including waiting for Google to visit my verification page and waiting for GoDaddy (my domain registrar) to propagate my updated MX records, took about two hours. Not bad, considering what I’m getting out of the deal.

Speaking of which, it’s free, so what’s the catch? Well, first, there is a premium version that offers support, uptime guarantees, and so forth. It’s expensive at $50 per user per year. But mainly, when you read your email messages using the Web interface, Google displays its AdWords links (paid Google spots) on the left, and it displays ads based on the content of your email. That’s it. And in truth, I didn’t even notice those ads until I read about them somewhere else!

Well, some would say that it's problematic to allow Google to "keep" so much of your own information. That doesn't bother me too much, though. Being a mail server adminstrator for years, I can tell you that there are most likely copies of every email you've ever sent or received stored somewhere by some system or another. This would be a good topic for another post, perhaps - the whole privacy issue in the information age.