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.

Backscattered?

Are you seeing a bunch of email bounces in your inbox - bounces from emails that you never sent in the first place?

For example:

From: Some System Administrator
Undeliverable
Subject: Your message "Swanky Rolex Watches" could not be delivered
Error 1234; see attached for details

I am.

Fortunately, it (probably) doesn't mean that somebody has hijacked your email account and is sending email as you, getting rich from selling swanky Rolex knockoffs. There's always a chance your email account has been hijacked, no matter how remote; however there is NO chance anybody's getting rich on swanky Rolex fakes. Is there? Hmm...does anybody really buy fake Rolex watches, besides maybe duped characters in sitcoms which of course aren't real people (except for The Simpsons). Or maybe costume designers for TV and movies? Which I assume has to be a very narrow market. But I digress.

It's called backscattter or "collateral spam," and unfortunately it's the next wave of trouble we can expect from email on the internet.

Backscatter is a message you receive, informing you that email you did not send was not delivered to someone you do not know. Spammers or viruses send out mail forging your email address in a the reply-to, knowing that it will get blocked by anti-spam firewalls. (Note that this is different than hijacking your account - hijacking means that somebody has real access to your email, sending messages through our own network surreptitiously. That's a far worse situation).

Spammers are banking on the fact that there are so many improperly configured mail servers and firewalls which will accept those messages and generate Non-Delivery Reports (NDRs, or bounces) to the forged address in the reply-to. That's you.

So, this is an indirect way of sending spam, relying on social engineering. I'm sure a lot of people see these "Message could not be delivered" emails and open them - after all, it could have been an important email you sent which never got delivered. But instead you've just been tricked into opening spam.

And these messages pass a lot of firewall test because they're non-delivery reports. The email subject line itself generally doesn't contain anything which looks like spam, and the actual message is often contained as an attachment.

For now, all you can do is grin and bear it - and keep hitting the delete key. If you want to learn more about this subject, have at it here or here.

Gmail is a very useful web app

I know, I haven’t posted any blog entries in a while. Been busy like crazy with projects, and this time of year it’s even harder with the start of our Little League team and also all the yard work that has to be done early spring. At least tax season is behind us.

Anyway, let’s see...what’s the latest tech tip I can share with you? The coolest thing I’ve tried lately is Gmail’s

Here’s how I have mine set up. I’ve got Gmail configured to check my main two accounts via POP3, BUT leave messages on the server. That’s an important option, because that way messages will still download to my “main” tower system at home. If I didn’t tell Gmail to leave messages on the server, Gmail would download and remove them and they’d be unavailable to me on my main computer. That would be bad.

Gmail has lots of useful options for this, too - such as the ability to respond to somebody using the address they sent to originally. This cuts back on the confusion that can happen when somebody who emails you at one particular address and gets a reply from another. If you email me at vin@keystonewebs.com and I reply through Gmail, it should appear to come from keystonewebs.com.

Other Office-ey features include an address book, which you can populate from your Mac’s address book in a variety of ways, integration with Google calendar, and integration with Google Documents.

Oh, and it even has an out of office function which, after the next few hectic months, I’ll be ready to use when I take my vacation!

If you’re an email power user with multiple accounts, which you need to access from various locations while still preserving a “master” account somewhere,
Gmail is the way to go. It’s (naturally) free.

Oh geesh, I almost forgot the best thing about using Gmail this way - the iPhone! Gmail’s web interface on the iPhone is WAAAAY better, IMHO, than the dedicated mail app. multiple account features. This is the closest thing to Exchange functionality with Exchange and the expense it involved. If you’ve got multiple email accounts and struggle to find a way to access those accounts from multiple computers (from a remote office, or friend’s house, or wireless hotspot), this is the way to do it.

Widescreen Email

Widescreen monitors are quite popular these days. Instead of the "old school" 4:3 aspect ratio which resembles a square, they're designed with a 16:9 aspect ratio which is rectangular. I'm guessing that one of the big reasons for the prevalence of widescreen monitors is the rising popularity of watching movies and TV shows on your computer. And, well, everything else just seems wider these days, no?

I have a pair of widescreen monitors both at home and at work, and I love them. For me, it's not just about 'fun and games' either - I find them very useful in my actual work. If you've ever built a movie in Final Cut Pro or iMovie, or edited a song in Garageband, or worked in any other application that's uses a timeline, you know what I mean. They're probably great for Flash developers. That extra space from left to right comes in handy - you can see more of your project at once, and jump to various points without a whole lot of horizontal scrolling.

A lot of software, however, is designed for the 4:3 world, or not really designed to consider aspect ratio one way or the other. A good example is Apple's mail program. Fortunately, there's a great (and free) plug-in called WideMail which gives you extra configuration options for Mail that leverage your widescreen.



(I know the capture is small, but I didn't want you to be able to read my email!)

WideMail is based on the three-column view that's always been present in Mail, but with a few twists beyond the Mail program's default settings. For starters, it lets you have a two-line mail list (center column) so that you can see the Sender or Subject on one line, and the other mail details such as date and attachments, on a second. This really is an improvement over Apple's layout. I can easily fit my folder list on the left, message list in the middle, and message preview on the right. And now, I can almost always see the ENTIRE message.

WideMail also lets you turn on borders for the message list view, and use different colors for the subject and/or sender. There are other settings you can play around with, but these are the main ones I'm using. The plug-in adds its own tab to the Mail preference applet as you can see below:



It took me a few minutes to figure out how to get the two-line message list to show. Tip - WideMail treats this as a "view" so you have to right-click the column header and select WideMail as a column, and then turn off the standard, default columns.



Little tip for Mac users with widescreens (and that includes any flat-panel iMac): because you've got so much more room horizontally, you come up a little short vertically. Putting your dock on the left or right, instead of bottom, makes better use of your screen real estate.