Being a bit of a tech head and knowing a thing or two about email it only seems proper to have my own email server and for the last few years I did. I started out with building a Linux server running SendMail then graduated up to running a full blow Microsoft Exchange infrastructure with Domain servers, DNS servers, Front End servers, Email gateways, the whole bit. Lately though its become a bit of a hassle to run. The servers constantly need to be updated, the server everything runs on is behind on some crucial updates and it’s starting to run a bit slow, etc. So I started looking at other solutions, cutting back on the number of servers running, move to a hosted solution, use an email forwarding solution, etc.
Considerations
Going from my own Exchange server with Outlook 2007 to a new solution required some questions to be answered before I made the move:
How was I going to get the mail?
How many mailboxes could I have?
How to sync with all my devices?
What about calendar updates?
What about contacts?
How to migrate the data?
Keeping email in house was probably the easiest solution, I would just need to build a couple of servers then migrate all my data over. The solution would be a Windows Small Business server running Exchange so only one server would be needed and wouldn’t take much to setuo and configure. I could take my time, move slowly and have everything done in a couple of weeks. The only issue is that I would still need to update the server constantly, pay for the software license, make sure the hardware was running right, etc.
Using an email forwarding solution didn’t really do it for me either, I could still keep my email addresses but since having my own email server for so long, switching to an ISP email account just feels dirty. Besides I’m not even sure how to access or configure it.
I decided on moving to the cloud or a hosted solution, for me this is the best of both worlds, I can keep my domain name and email addresses but not have the hassle of configuring, running and maintaining my own systems. And even more appealing Google Apps has a free version for accounts of less that 50 users. Perfect!!
Google Apps
I knew of Google Apps but never really looked into it and had no idea what was available. What you get with the free version of Google Apps for me is excellent, 50 user accounts, each with 7GB of storage, access to Google calender, contacts and a few other apps. The key, was I could keep my domain name. Basically Google hosts your domain name and you use the Gmail backend to host your mail, just point your name servers to Google and away you go. Getting access to data can be done either through the gmail web interface or any IMAP/POP3 client.
They also make it very easy to migrate over. When you create an account and setup your own domain a second domain is created, @<your.domain>.test-google-a.com; this gives the option to migrate test users over first before doing a complete cut over. Along with “Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Outlook” tool, moving user data to the cloud seems like a breeze.
The Next Steps
In part 2 of this article I’ll go through the steps to setup an account with Google, setup a domain, migrate data to an account and setup an email client using IMAP.
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