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Review of GMail for Your Domain
DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."
This was published ages ago; anyone know though how big the beta is?
One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address.
It's to do with GMail including your gmail address in the headers of the email (the Sender: header?).
http://blog.grcm.net/
This is actually something that microsoft came out with before google. Weird.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
I gave it a try for my domain, anthropology.net, and aside from somewhat of a hurdle getting my registrar to use Google's MX records, I have nothing but praise for the GMail hosting service. It really offers me and my site a professional web mail service.
Although, I must say I swapped back out because they don't seem to have a catch-all email feature, like *@anthropology.net
Anthropology.net - Beyond bones and stones.
Mirror if slashdotted, enjoy!
the # of accounts is said to be based off of what info you provided when you signed up. we were in the process of setting this up at work, and while i dunno how many accounts we were given, but i know it was more than 25.
I was fortunate enough to get in on the beta test of this service. Setup was as easy as could be expected. You need to know how to set up MX records for your domain but thats about it.
Runs almost as smoothly as a regular google mail account. There are some hiccups but I guess thats what you get when using an early beta. I like it enough that I've moved my regular mail to this service though.
"One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address."
That's really more of an Outlook issue. GMail is adhering to the standards. "From" identifies the nominal author(s) of a message. "Sender" identifies the specific, single agent which originated a message. See RFC-2822, Section 3.6.2.
It's hardly GMail's fault that Outlook presents that information in such a funny looking way.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
That link doesn't work for me but the Mirrordot link is quite snappy.
(feel free to let me know if I'm missing something that mitigates or eliviates these issues)
a) I'm sorry, but I'd like some better means of archiving and backing up my email than accessing it via pop3 client. especially as admin- I'd need some means of doing this in bulk.
b) ads. while I know it could be worse.. I've been running my own webmail (iloha/squirrel) via imap. no ads. I just like not seeing them, and don't know how much I'd be willing to pay to not see them against my previous setup.
c) visuals. I previously had much more flexibility and better integration with other site/app/branding. sorry a little 149x58-ish pic doesn't really work as "branding" an entire web presence.
d) bulk import. I don't want to leave my mass of imap folders/clutter/organization behind!
e) hosted domains don't get the same "ever growing" storage as normal gmail accounts. small thing, but it seems kinda silly to go with a domain via gmail, but not to get all the gmail "features".
f) change scares me. there are several "features" hinted at, that aren't in play now... like multiple levels/account types, additional services, etc... am I going to get dragged into additional "features I don't want?" are some of my current features going to be moved to "non-free" account levels? I wish I could let it handle all my domain's accounts but my three main... keep those safe during the testing period until things stabalize... assuming that this beta period doesn't last the next 5 years.
in the end, I know- these are paltry things, and for someone who owns nothing but a domain name.. gmail hosting their mail may not be a bad thing.
However it's listed right there on the Gmail for your Domain home page.
"Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."
Having maintained Email servers before I can tell you that even the most elegant server software and the most robust Hardware will still give you the occasional headache.
Not as bad as Exchange on a "SCSI cluster". That's when you use a cluster capable SCSI enclosure like the Dell PowerVault 220s and cluster capable RAID card like PERC3/DC controller, To provide failover, redundancy and high availability (You know. All the right buzzwords).
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
I wrote a review more than a month ago and submitted it to slashdot. The problem I had with Gmail was that I was used to having my mail locally, so I could read it no matter what. Google didn't offer an imap or even pop3 option.
The Television Wiki
i put up a few screenshots on this yesterday.
My biggest gripe is that they don't yet offer a catch-all account. If a mailbox doesn't exist, don't give you the option to catch it in a specific mailbox instead of bouncing it.
Catch-alls are how a lot of people who own their own domains provide unique email addresses to every site they visit so they know if someone sold their address and can block it with ease.
1) There is currently no option to change the colors of the UI. Yes, you can change the colors of the little login box, but nothing else. Our site has a black background with dark orange and burgundy, so the switch is like night and day. (litteraly)
2) I was not able to find a good way to add a header on top of the GMail hosted site. It would be nice to include some navigational buttons to get you back into the site. Currently, we just created a subdomain and pointed that to a directory that meta refreshes the page to our Google hosted site. (If anyone has any advice, please let me know)
3) Login directly from domain. (again if anyone has any insight on this, please let me know)
4) Manually having to add each user is going to be a pain, but a small price to pay I guess.
Besides those things, I'm lovin` it!
Here are a couple images of the interface if you haven't seen them yet: main admin page, user listing, adding new email, domain settings, change login color, bult account update
- John
I got it for one of my biger domains yesterday, so far its almost the same as Gmail except the address is username@mydomain.com
;)
took a few minutes to point the mx records, the admin control panel is cool enough, you can add your companies logo instead of gmails, batch create acounts by uploading a list
so far im fairly impressed (fairplay to google) pity its only 25emails i have 40000members on one site alone who will be interested
> I'd say one of the mail problems with GMail is the fact that their outbound SMTP relayers
> are off-and-on listed in the dnsbl.sorbs.net blackhole. This means mail you send out may
> get blocked by receiving servers that check this blackhole.
>
> I'm regularly getting these kinds of messages when I send out mail and that really sucks:
>
> PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Service unavailable; Client host [64.233.166.180]
> blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Spam Received See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?64.233.166.180
How is that a problem with GMail? Seems to me it's a problem with sorbs.
sorbs has suggested to GMail that GMail should expose the IP address from which the message originated; that way sorbs could block by real IP instead of GMail's mailing agent's IP. GMail has responded that to expose the IP of the sender would violate the privacy of the sender. sorbs responds, basically, "well, IP address is how we work. If you only give us one IP address to work with, that's the one we list as blackholed." And so they list the GMail outbound IP addresses as blocked.
More saliently, sorbs says:
sorbs does NOT block email, websites or the Internet.
sorbs is NOT CAPABLE of blocking email, websites or the Internet.
What you need to do is contact the mail server that (after communicating with sorbs) decided to block your mail. The only way sorbs will ever change their policy of "you must violate the privacy of your users or we will block your mail" is of enough of their users complain about it.
(sig) The last bug isn't fixed until the last user is dead. (/sig)