I’ve finally seen the true potential of Gmail.
Recently, I’ve decided to stop hosting all my email on my own single server and move it to something more reliable. I’ve got a DreamHost account that I’m slowly moving websites to so I figured I’d just create the account here.
This presents a couple challenges. First off, I use lots of dot-qmail aliases. DreamHost doesn’t seem to have this concept of loose user aliases. This would be annoying having to find all 100 or so aliases and add them. Plus, I’m not a big fan of DreamHost’s policy of rotating the inbox to keep the size down. They also use SpamAssassin for spam filtering which I’ve had to tweak a whole lot on my system to keep the spam to a minimum… not something I wanted to do again. So, this removes them as a contender for my email host.
Next up I tried Google Apps. I signed up as soon as I heard about the beta a while ago with one of my never-used domains and really liked how easily you could integrate everything. They’ve recently added the ability for you to have one domain as the master domain and multiple alias domains so user1@alias-domain is the same as user1@master-domain. This works great for me, as I’ve got the only email account on these small domains I can just have chris@domain for everything.
There is still the problem of my Google Talk contacts list, existing mail on my old gmail account, and everywhere that I’m using that @gmail.com email address. So this means that I’ll just make Gmail my primary inbox so I have a single point for all email. I’m just using the free version of Google Apps to serve as my domain catch-all and forward on to my Gmail account.
Gmail lets you add additional email addresses (after verifying that you are the owner of the mailbox), so I’ve just added my main accounts here and it will send from whatever account I choose, or if I’m replying it will send from the account that the original message was sent to. Nifty.
Now to get all of my old mail on my Gmail account. I created multiple accounts on my server and copied specific maildir folders into them so I could have Gmail slurp them in using its POP3 access. You can label incoming messages per account, which was perfect for my approach as these were already filed how I wanted them in my mail folders. The import worked great, but it took a long time to import. All of my email probably took about 24 hours.
I’ve always liked Gmail but I haven’t had enough mail volume going through there to actually see how easy it will be to keep a clean inbox and still have everything neatly filed away. Now I’ve already looked for a few older messages and they couldn’t have been easier to find. The search is powerful and as fast as you’d expect from Google. The keyboard shortcuts are great - if you haven’t got them turned on in your Gmail account I’d suggest doing so and then taking the time to learn them. You can do pretty much everything without having to reach for the mouse.
I’d recommend anybody use this setup for a reliable, free email system with very few limitations. I’ll be moving my users over to a similar setup soon.
