I registered a domain for my family’s email some years ago and it has been hosted by a traditional method. I use a company (Dreamhost) that provides web and email hosting. So far, this has been a great option to the various free email services that are popular for a day and then get replaced. I wanted something that would last years and always allow me to connect with people over that time. This hosted solution has other advantages, most notably, the ability to save all my email and access it via IMAP. Those two can not be over exaggerated when your wife wants an email you sent last month and you only have your iPhone. Traditional email uses POP, which anyone who uses a desktop will tell you, once you download it, you can’t get it back on webmail. Hence the mail hosting. Over the years, free webmail has grown to encompass these two advantages of the traditional hosting model, but still require you to use their domain, i.e. me@fremail.com. Not bad, but not terribly portable. If they go out of business/get bought out/change service, you’re out of luck. So, I had not real reason to move from Dreamhost to another hosting solution for my email.
Until recently.
I noticed Dreamhost tried hard to advertise the ability to host your email on Gmail for several months before I actually even looked at what it meant. Essentially, they are referencing Google’s App service. For just about any organization, you can get fifty (50) free accounts that come with Gmail, Docs and Calendaring. Not bad. Everyone needs email these days. Throw in calendaring and document creation and you have me interested. The real trick would be how this all worked.
It was easy.
Dreamhost has a link on the panel under mail management to get you started. Essentially, you sign-up with Google Apps for your domain and then have the option to setup what apps are available and for whom. After that, you can access email, calendar and docs with ease. The pieces that intrigue me the most are calendar sharing and storage capacity. I uploaded my entire email archive and it came in at almost 7600 messages and several hundred megabytes. That’s pretty large for some and not so much for others. To get it up there, Google also has a handy little tool aptly named the Google Email Uploader. I used it on my Mac with Mail and had no problems uploading both my and my wife’s email. The only email that was skipped were duplicates. It all ended up under a label (Google eschews the traditional folder paradigm for IMAP accounts) with today’s date.
So far, no problems.