Hosting email can be a real chore: dealing with downtime, spam, mail client configuration. It’s great if you can avoid it, but some clients prefer not to have their email hosted at their ISP, and so the responsibility falls on you. Even at work, we’re finding that email services through our hosting provider is somewhat limited.

What we’d like is:

• Lots of storage
• Shared calendars
• Access to all email from a web client
• Affordable
• Ability to easily create addresses and aliases

We’ve looked at Microsoft Exchange services, but they’ve been too costly. What we’ll probably go with is Google Apps Premiere Edition. GMail has been around for a while now, and even though I personally use it very little I know it has some killer features. Reliability, speed, ease of use, and the IMAP option lets you keep all your email on the server, yet access it all with Outlook. It even has a shared calendar — previously something exclusive to Exchange servers.

We’d like to use GMail at work, but there are a few things holding us back:

Transferring existing email

I’ve got a huge amount of email in my Outlook mailbox (aka PST file), so moving my emails over to a new service is an absolute requirement. Google provides a solutions for this in a desktop app called the Email Uploader (what a typically Google name, huh).

My mailbox is about 2.5 GB — a pretty huge amount of data to upload, especially if I try to do it from our crappy DSL connection through MTS. Luckily, you don’t need to upload everything all at once; if you stop halfway through, you can resume where you left off. As well, if you’re running a Google Apps pilot, your emails will be sent to both your current email host and your Google mail account. This is comforting because it means you can always turn back if you’re not happy with the pilot.

Losing control over our email

There’s a certain “creepiness factor” about giving Google access to all your conversations. You’re probably familiar seeing advertisements in GMail, but since the Premiere Edition is a paid service there are no contextual ads. Still, Google does have access to all your emails and even though their motto is “don’t be evil”, there is the worry that someone could get access to your emails, or Google could use your conversations for marketing purposes. One option would be to use a public key encryption system, such as this GPG plugin for Outlook 2007. Really, it’s surprising that so few people encrypt their emails, but since it requires both the sender and receiver to have PGP / GPG software installed, encryption has had a hard time catching on with the general public.

Setting up a pilot program with Google Apps

A great feature of  Google Apps is the ability to test it out before you fully commit your company to using it. You can select certain users to be included in a pilot program, while everyone else in your organization uses your current email system. This is a great way to see if Google mail is right for you.

Everything you could ever want to know about this can be found in the Google Apps Pilot Guide, so I won’t repeat it here. I will warn you of one tricky step though: after you’ve verified ownership of your subdomain, Google will display some information about configuring your Mail Exchange (MX) records. Do not follow these instructions exactly. Since we’re setting up email to go to the subdomain, we must only set up the Google MX records for the subdomain. Switching these records on your primary domain would cause all your email to get routed to Google’s mail server, which you don’t want at this point.

Once you’ve set up your subdomain to handle GMail, change the settings in your current mail account so that a copy of each email is forwarded to your GMail account (eg: [email protected]).

What next?

Email hosting with Google Apps has some great features, and the price is pretty good: $50 per account / year. Google makes it painless to switch over with their email uploader app… although “painless” is relative in this case — I’m currently at 2188 of 55756 emails uploaded… that’s 2.75 GB of mail. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Photo credit: smil@flickr