So in a recent "Why didn't somebody tell me sooner?" moment, I learned that some large web hosting companies are encouraging their customers to use Google Apps and GMail to take the place of their domains' mailservers.
This sounds great since probably 70% of our server space is being wasted on storing clients' email.
If I could migrate all our clients to GMail that would free up at least a couple of servers worth of space and save us from having to pay for another upgrade any time soon.
So is anyone here doing this for their own clients?
Any problems or potential problems?
(Yeah, I know slashdot had this up a year ago... what can I say? I'm too swamped with work to stay up with the latest and greatest...)
I know taco does cause he's the one who told me about it.
I'm going to attempt with my personal domain and see how it goes. The subdomains for docs. spreadsheet. etc will be nice for added security on sensitive documents.
I switched my personal e-mail to it about 7 months ago and my company switched about 5 months ago. Since then we've switched 10 or 11 clients over to it and so far everyone has loved it.
Jason L. Wright
I'm not that hard to imitate. Just make some random negative claim at Apple or anything else for that matter and then have nothing to back it up.
Are you just trying to transfer e-mails over? If so then it's very simple. In your original GMail account go into settings and set it up so that it can be accessed via POP3. In your new account you then have it check your original one and download ll of the messages. If you've used Labels a lot and don't want to lose them then it's probably a bit more difficult. For that I would probably use an e-mail client (Outlook) and setup both accounts via IMAP. All of your labels then show up as Folders and you can copy a folder from one to the other. I migrated from Outlook to GMail pretty easily.
Jason L. Wright
I'm not that hard to imitate. Just make some random negative claim at Apple or anything else for that matter and then have nothing to back it up.
We don't typically deal with hosting for our clients. But, we switched to google apps/email hosting like this over a year ago now. I've been very happy with it and have found good use for just about every feature included.
A little more touchy if the switch is for clients. I have run across notes on their support boards about people running into problems in some unique circumstances. So, I would recommend switching. But, do some research into potential hiccups for each circumstance.
Last edited by FlashLackey; 06-06-2009 at 08:17 AM.
"We don't estimate speeches." - CBO Director Doug Elmendorf
I know taco does cause he's the one who told me about it.
I'm going to attempt with my personal domain and see how it goes. The subdomains for docs. spreadsheet. etc will be nice for added security on sensitive documents.
Yes, I've been pushing my clients over to Google Apps for I think 3 years now. Possibly more. I found about it way back when it was first announced, and have loved it ever since. I see absolutely no reason NOT to use Google Apps. It beats managing Exchange servers in the enterprise world.
The only thing (and I could be wrong, just heard from others) is that the free version of Google Apps can't be used in some enterprise situations due to security and encryption. But I believe that's solved with the paid version.
Any idea how to merge your normal gmail account with a new one running through google apps?
If they're both Gmail, you can actually do a really cool trick to bring both inboxes into the same location seamlessly.
I know my roommate uses it for all normal Gmail account, our house email account, and @ydekproductions.com email. It all goes into his Gmail inbox nicely.
From Gmail, or even the Google Apps Gmail, you can go to Settings > Account. From there you can add POP3/IMAP accounts, and also set up the Send As settings.
At that point, say you were logged into your normal gmail account. You added your new Google Apps domain to be pulled into there. If you set up the Send As properly, you can just respond like you normally do, and it'll be sent as the proper email address.
You can take it a step further then, and apply tag rules based on the "To:" field, so you can sort by email accounts. There's also the Labs Multiple Inboxes feature, but I found that to be a bit clunky.
How does this work? What does the recipient see if they look in the headers of the email message? Is Gmail spoofing the 'sent from' address, but the actual IP that the message gets sent from does not back-resolve properly? This is a typical rule set up on corporate mail servers to identify as spam. Unless their rules specifically ignore those sent from Gmail (doubt it) then it sounds like this is not a complete solution...
I don't think it matters since all outgoing mail goes through smtp.google.com even with Google Apps accounts. It may be spoofing for other accounts, but regardless in this case, it's always originating from the same server.
And again, I've never had any issues with any of our emails being reported as spam. Except occasionally an email from our billing department does. But that may be a client excuse. Who knows!
I haven't tested that feature out. But, went as far as setting a "Send As" account up. It does ask for credentials and confirmation that you own the account. So, maybe it does use that mail server to send as well?
"We don't estimate speeches." - CBO Director Doug Elmendorf
I've known the multiple account feature. I use it for my work email, have for some time. I actually thought about using it to merge my old gmail into a new google apps mail but I doubt it would bring in all of my labels/filters. It's probably work fine going the other way though.
We have a partner company, too small to hire tech people, mostly distributed workforce, and a lot of people who are consultants, not direct employees. They don't even have a file server, they just email stuff around.
I'm trying to push them onto GApps for business, b/c they send out stuff from their personal AOL addresses, with scripty pink footers.
"What really bugs me is that my mom had the audacity to call Flash Kit a bunch of 'inept jack-asses'." - sk8Krog
...and now I have tape all over my face.
I've known the multiple account feature. I use it for my work email, have for some time. I actually thought about using it to merge my old gmail into a new google apps mail but I doubt it would bring in all of my labels/filters. It's probably work fine going the other way though.
Wouldn't export->import the filters work? I'm probably missing something...
"We don't estimate speeches." - CBO Director Doug Elmendorf
I thank lifehacker.com for greatly expanding my gmail utilization.
My lone invention is attached. It's good for anyone sending and receiving invoices and contracts (like any contractor). It's 3 filters that automatically tag outgoing invoices to "A/R" (Accounts Receivable) and incoming invoices to "A/P" (Accounts Payable). The third tags work orders, service agreements, etc. as a "Contract".
Makes it nice when you want to filter everything out and just look at those documents.
"We don't estimate speeches." - CBO Director Doug Elmendorf
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Originally Posted by jAQUAN
"Why does it hurt when I pee?" -- F. Zappa | 
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