ivixlog

Google conquers another front

Over the last week I have started migrating my domains to Google Apps.

Google Apps is google’s package of services to essentially host an organisation’s entire IT setup. This is a completely full service offering, from email hosting, to webhosting, including office apps like word processor, spreadsheet and shared calendaring, which are of course all (nearly) perfectly integrated with each other. Did I also mention that it’s free?

You can sign up for them as different types of organisation (school, small business, corporate, family/groups) and each is free for up to a certain number of users, and with a certain level of features However, unlike most free versions, they haven’t been greedy and made the free versions a crippled, broken version that no one is expected to actually use.

Paying extra will let you access their API to integrate your existing databases with the google apps.

Why switch?

For me, email is the only real compelling reason to use google apps. I run my own mail servers, and have done so for many years. It’s not a bad setup, with multiple domains, mailboxes, antispam, etc. A number of my friends have accounts on them. The reason I set up the mail system in the first place was the same as why I set up a lot of other things, to figure out how it worked, and for the novelty. After running them for over half a decade and looking after an isp’s email too, the novelty had decidedly worn off. Now, they are merely a liability. Cost is an issue, but I also have to worry about backups, security, performance, etc. Losing everyone’s email is not really an option. Having said all that, Postfix has been faultless as ever, and together with MySQL, amavis, spamassassin, postgrey (for greylisting) and courier-imap, the system has the same level of features as any I could mention, and I never really need to worry about it. I haven’t had to do any maintenance at all in the last 6 months.

The switch

I switched a test domain first. You sign up and you get given a list of MX servers to put into your DNS records for that domain. That done, you have to verify your domain, by putting a magically named CNAME record in the zone file too. For me this was straightforward but I can imagine that someone who doesn’t spend all day working with dns and email might find this bit tricky. Google has a bit of a difficult situation here, in that people who register a domain tend to leave it with the registrar and this kind of thing is generally not done. Not sure what they can do to smooth the process. If you don’t have a domain, those smart hordes at google have a solution. You buy your domain through google, via godaddy.com. After signing up with the strangely named dns registrar, they will take care of all of that.

After that dns faff, it went extremely smoothly. You can set up the users you want, you set up aliases, etc. You can even make one domain mirror the setup of another, so user@foo is also user@bar. That’s pretty useful. After you switch the MX records, the email starts flowing into google instantly, without any fuss. Having never really used gmail before, it took me a couple of days to get used to it’s approach to email, but its growing on me. With IMAP access too, I could simply use it as I have used my previous email system. Nice.