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

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

[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

[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'.

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: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

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:Govt spooks

[rm69990]

Probably none. No one gives a shit about you.

Re:Wow

[Reaperducer]

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

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: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: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

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!

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.