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Switched to GMail.

Well, I’ve finally become a convert. After using GMail for a while at work, I’ve become addicted enough to want to use it on my personal accounts. I looked into Google Apps For Your Domain, created an account, but decided not to go that way. Here’s how I saw things:

  • Good: It totally takes over your e-mail.
  • Bad: You have to change your MX record — no way to keep a copy of the e-mails yourself.
  • Good: Its easy to use, and branded to “my domain” (like that really matters)
  • ???: Can I unify my old GMail account with my Google Apps account? How?

Anyway, since I was really intent on keeping a copy of all my e-mail on my own server, I decided that I shouldn’t use Google Apps, and that I should just have postfix send an extra copy to my exsiting gmail account. That way, I get to keep the originals, as well as have the nice web interface that I’ve become addicted to. Its seeming to work out really well so far, and I’ve set it up to set the “reply-to” as my old account name, so unless people are really paying a lot of attention, they shouldn’t even be able to tell I’m using gmail.

Hooray!

(I’ll post here if there are any other problems in the future…)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Linux Stuff, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Switched to GMail.”

  1. Chris Says:
    February 14th, 2007 at 6:50 pm

    Just thought I would give you a hit around this area. You do not have to change your MX records to Google Apps to use the service.

    There are ways you can keep your current MX records pointed at your mail server and then pass mail onto the Google services. To do this you register your primary domain. Then verify you own the domain using a cname or HTML file. Once you have proven ownership the system will let you send email out as that top level domain, even if the MX records are not pointed at the Google servers.

    Then, you create a domain alias (possibly with a sub-domain.) You then set the MX records of this alias to the Google Apps servers. Now you can either set your current system to forward mail also to this alias, or use MTA routing rules to route to the Google servers they list to point your MX records using the alias. I know this works, and if you really want to use both Google Apps and another system, this is the way to do it.

    Best of luck!

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