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."

Comments

Old news but welcome

[commanderfoxtrot]

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?).

Re:Old news but welcome

[sprins]

One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address.

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

Wow

[heatdeath]

This is actually something that microsoft came out with before google. Weird.

Re:Wow

[radiotyler]

Not really. It seems more and more Google is taking things that have already been done, and just putting their own branded spin on them, often with much better functionality. I mean, MS already did webmail, yahoo already did finance, maps, etc.

Just another dingus in the line of GoogleDingus®.

Re:Wow

[utlemming]

Yeah, but there is no comparision between the products. Microsoft's sucks hard. You turn over control of your domain name to them -- so you have to use their stuff. You just can't point your mx records at them.

Google allows retention of domain control, you just point your mx record at them.

Microsoft is going for Joe Sixpack who wants to have branded email. Google is going for the bigger guys that really know what there doing and what they want.

Slashdot accepted my review, just hasn't published it yet. Here it is: http://utlemming.blogstream.com/

To sum it up, two different services, one sucks hard and the other is pretty good.

Re:Wow

[heatdeath]

Google allows retention of domain control, you just point your mx record at them.

Microsoft is going for Joe Sixpack who wants to have branded email. Google is going for the bigger guys that really know what there doing and what they want.

No, I'm talking about live.com custom domains, not live office. Live office is for joe sixpack; live.com custom domains do exactly what gmail does.

If slashdot publishes your review, slashdot sucks. =P

Re:Wow

[rm69990]

Meh, Yahoo! had it first before either of them anyways. Doesn't matter who did it first, what matters is who does it better.

Re:Wow

[Reaperducer]

Hotmail was a successful webmail operation years before Microsoft bought it.

Re:Wow

[zenwarrior]

I still have my hotmail account from pre-microsoft. It's now so overloaded with spam that I only check it once a month or so to sift through the garbage...

Interesting. I also have a Hotmail account that dates back to the internet's Copper Wire Age. However, several months ago it went from being a spam magnet to one of the cleanest free web-mail accounts I have.

Even better, as one of the ancient and original Hotmail accounts, it has [free] POP3 access -- a Hotmail option now only available by paying for either MSN Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium.

BTW, the only [known?] way to determine if your basic free Hotmail account is POP3-accessible is by trying it. Use your full e-mail address as the username (e.g., somebody@hotmail.com) and your normal Hotmail password. The server's address is: http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp .

If it works for you as it does for me, enjoy!

I gave it a try

[kkamrani]

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

Re:I gave it a try

[outZider]

That's a Good Thing(tm), really. Catchalls are huge spam traps. If you end up getting a dictionary attack, every address they try is set to 'valid'. ;)

Re:I gave it a try

[Pathwalker]

Catchalls are huge spam traps. If you end up getting a dictionary attack, every address they try is set to 'valid'. ;)

Is this a bad thing? A few friends and I have found that there are uses for having a set of addresses which only get spam...

Re:I gave it a try

[krbvroc1]

I have nothing but praise for the GMail hosting service. It really offers me and my site a professional web mail service.

Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy. All my 'business' email with your organization will end up on googles server forever to be part of my demographic profile and who knows what else is done with it. All this and I didn't even sign up for gmail.

Next thing you know this will be solution for those FBI agents without fbi.gov addresses.

Re:I gave it a try

[big tex]

Yeah, nothing is more professional than handing over your business email to google with their unlimited data retention policy

Have the Enron trials taught us nothing?
No corporate email is truly private. (possible exception for encrypted stuff. how many 'regular' businesses do that anyway?) If the government wants to read your mail, they'll subpoena it and get it anyway. If a competitor (I work in construction, a non-IT business) wants to read your mail, well, they're out of luck either way, unless they get a court order - at which point, it doesn't matter whose servers the mail is on.

Hell, by passing the buck to Google, it might save you some hassle on the Sarbanes-Oxley data retention stuff.

Re:I gave it a try

[SetupWeasel]

Maybe I'm wrong, but as far as I've heard, most if not all commercial email services retain your email messages and this information is subject to warrants.

Google at least has a track record of fighting the government when it feels they have no business to ask for the information. Most of the telcos simply rolled over when the government started tapping phone calls without warrants.

I'm sure Google wasn't the only search provider approached by the government to provide search data. Why didn't we hear about the others? Maybe they just forked over the information.

Again, my knowledge of the subject is imperfect, but it doesn't seem to me that Google is any worse of a choice than others.

Re:I gave it a try

[krbvroc1]

No corporate email is truly private.

I think people are confusing the issues here. If I send an email to a company online, I expect that company to protect my email according to their privacy policy. By 'contracting out' your email hosting to a third-party, in this case google, any privacy policy you adopt with me is meaningless.

This isn't about the government reading my mail with a subpeona. This is about my communications being disclosed to a third party whose sole business model is extracting the maximum advertising dollar out of that information without my permission.

As far as Sarbanes-Oxley, that law only applies to public companies registered with the SEC in the US. And even then since you have absolutely no control over what google does with the data, how could you have any assurances about data detention?

Re:I gave it a try

[big tex]

You are correct, I only addressed one of the privacy issues.
I see two (largely generalized) issues:
1) Google's internal use of your information, basically for advertising.
2) The external use of your information, whether it be third parties, the government, competitors, whoever.
This is basically defined by the terms of use.

As to #1 (internal use): Personally, most of my work email is very mundane and has lots of attachments. I'm an engineer, working offsite. Lots of large attachments with drawings and calculation packages. (Yes, we've got an FTP site for the big stuff, but a dozen 2-meg emails a day add up in a hurry.) If Google thinks they can profit from selling ads based on my co-worker's ALL CAPS emails on the finer points on contract management and gear meshing, more power to them.

As to #2 (external use): the gmail policy specifies that they only sell aggregate data, not personally identifying. Not particularly problematic, at least to me. That is, I don't own a tin foil hat.

To each their own.
Oh, data retention does look kind of shaky. However, I kind of like the idea of being able to categorically say 'not my problem'.

Re:I gave it a try

[Tim C]

Not only that, but spammers tend to fake the From: headers on their emails. A couple of months ago some lowlife scum happened on my domain; the flood has subsided a little, but at its height I was getting a couple of thousand mails a day.

That may not seem like much to some of you, but:

1) my domain has no website at it and gives no indication of being in use (other than resolving to a valid IP)
2) previous to that, I got maybe a couple of dozen crap mails a week

The pattern was actually reasonably interesting. At first they were all bounces, then gradually the number of bounces started to drop but I started getting spam to some of the fake addresses. Now I get bounces, spams, out of office autoreplies, the occasional indignant mail from people pissed off with spam, lots of "confirmation required" emails and even the occasional virus.

Catchalls are very useful too - when registering with a website I can give them an address that identifies them, so if I get spam to it, I know who leaked my details and can act accordingly. It's just a shame that some spammers are such lying, deceitful shits.

Re:I gave it a try

[kwark]

There is no such problem (at this moment) if you do greylisting BEFORE a spamassassin check. The python greylistd filters thousands of messages in the same time SA does 1.

Mirror if slashdotted

[DevanJedi]

Mirror if slashdotted, enjoy!

not limited to 25 accounts.

[kasek]

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.

Outlook, not Gmail

[DragonHawk]

"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.

Re:Cache / Mirror

[Professor_UNIX]

Site's running a little slowly so here's the NYUD link, just in case ;)

That link doesn't work for me but the Mirrordot link is quite snappy.

Amusing when I think of the tin foil hat crowd.

[vslashg]

So much for the folks at http://www.google-watch.org/gmail.html. They suggest folks never send mail to gmail.com, and provide boilerplate text to reply with in case someone at gmail.com mails them.

Well, now they might be sending mail directly to Google's servers without even knowing it! I find it highly amusing that these privacy advocates assume there's any privacy at all regarding the plaintext email they might send.

(I also find it amusing that among their privacy concerns, they also complain that gmail doesn't include the originating IP in the email headers. I guess consistency doesn't matter as long as they're railing against the great beast Google.)

Re:Amusing when I think of the tin foil hat crowd.

[markxz]

Well, now they might be sending mail directly to Google's servers without even knowing it! I find it highly amusing that these privacy advocates assume there's any privacy at all regarding the plaintext email they might send.

Many people forward emails to their gmail account so this was the case even before this new service was offered

my experience gmail hosting my email

[Not Public]

(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.

Re:my experience gmail hosting my email

[Not Public]

oh, and i want encryption & digital signing capabilities...

as long as I'm dreaming...

This is cool...

[irimi_00]

This is cool. Google will really all people to be more free, unless they are trying to take over the world.

I just applied, and asked them to reconsider my adsense application. I have no idea why my adsense was rejected. I think I'm too nutty. We'll see what they say.

Best Feature. Re:Old news but welcome

[Forge]

The author dose not state the absolute greatest feature of this service.

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).

Re:Best Feature. Re:Old news but welcome

[larry bagina]

I currently maintain email servers, and I agree 100%. However, thanks to HIPAA, Sarbanes Oxley, and various other regulations, having unencrypted email transmitted or stored outside your intranet is a huge legal liability in many cases. I've heard that google may be releasing a rackmounted gmail appliance (like their search appliance) that is integrated with their beta calander.

Re:Govt spooks

[rm69990]

Probably none. No one gives a shit about you.

screenshots

[hyperstation]

i put up a few screenshots on this yesterday.

No catch-all accounts

[isnoop]

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.

Re:No catch-all accounts

[stud9920]

Flawed for two reasons :
1) most address validators don't recognize this as a valid address
2) spammers can extract your real address after you've blocked the catchall alias you provided them.

Re:Old news

[DevanJedi]

Google's GMail (for your domain or otherwise) does offer POP now; I don't know if it did previously.

Re:Old news

[larry bagina]

Nice review. You probably submitted your story to the wrong address. This is the correct address to submit a slashdot story.

Not my problem

[DragonHawk]

"But I'd still prefer to inhibit the sending of the header."

And I'd prefer they didn't. It's useful to know who actually sent a message. (Sure, it can be forged anyway, but I'm talking about for administrative purposes, not security.) All my mail programs don't puke all over the screen when they get the header. If yours does, I suggest you contact the vendor of said program for support.

Thoughts and images

[se7en11]

Our website just got signed up this week and we're loving it so far. There are a few improvements I would like to see though.

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

got one

[wwmedia]

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

Re:sorbs blocks gmail

[jbx]

> 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.