With Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for Your Domain), you can setup all the emails for your own domain to be handled by Google, which is what I’ve done for all emails to bigbluedev.com. Why would you want to do this I hear you ask? Well, let me break it down for you!
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RELIABILITY
Its Google after all. I think you can be fairly sure that their servers aren’t going to be going down very often, that they aren’t going to lose you data, and that they will always be easily accessible.
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6GB FOR FREE
Google Apps is one of the few Google products where they have released a paid version as well as the free-for-all version. If you upgrade to the Premier Edition (at $50 per year) then you get 25gb of storage but at the time of writing the free version already comes with 6gb which I’m sure is more then enough for most users.
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SPAM FILTERING
Top class spam filtering at no extra cost. Google claim that as of October 2007 less than 1% of spam is now getting through their spam filters. Having only recently setup this domain I’m not yet receiving enough spam to be able to testify to this.
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EASY ACCESS
You can login and check your mail online from any computer. You can check your mail through POP3 or IMAP on your favourite desktop client, or you can check it while you’re out and about on your iPhone, Blackberry or java enabled mobile phone, and there are a whole load of notifier programs. The IMAP access is really useful should you want to import your mail from another account or make a backup of your current mail.
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LOADS OF OTHER GOOGLE APPS TOO
By signing up for Google Apps, as well as their email hosting, you also get Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Talk and a Start page all under the same account.
N.B. The only problem I have found with Google Mail is the lack of support for HTML signatures. However, you can add this feature by installing the Greasemonkey extension for firefox and adding this script.
Comments
on 22 Feb, 2008
A short while ago I was using Gmail to handle my emails for work, school, and business accounts that I use daily. I really enjoyed using that and Google Calendar.
I had all of my many emails accounts forward to my Gmail for consolidation. I sent replies from the email address that the message was sent to. However, after a short while I noticed that email clients like Outlook still displayed my gmail address no matter which domain I was sending from.
Read the note on: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=mail&answer=22370
I now have a more complicated setup for email and calendar management, but I still forward through Gmail for their SPAM filtering. It’s great for a free service.
on 13 Jun, 2008
Yes, Google Apps is great for email. You can login from anywhere and whatever machine you happen to find available. I’ve logged in from a refugee camp on the Thai/Burmese border and you have access to all your mail as smooth as anything.
And I can confirm that Google’s spam filtering works wonders. I have an old email address that I get a fair amount of spam when I access it outside of Google, but when I look at it sync’d to Google, hardly anything gets through.
The only thing to point out about your second point is that the Premier Edition is $50 per user account per year, so if you wanted to set up email accounts for a group of people on the one domain, you’d have to pay up for the priviledge.
But as you say, the 6gb free edition should be enough for most of us, and they will keep increasing the amount of storage - its almost up to 7gb now!