From WhyNotWiki
Contents |
[edit] Gmail
Gmail edit (Category edit) Category:Gmail
[edit] Point your mx records to Google Apps/Gmail Hosted?
[edit] How I signed up for it
I saw an ad on my normal Gmail account when I was on the Settings page:
Have your own domain?
- Use Gmail with your domain for free. Learn more
I was confused by how it was only marketing itself as being for "Businesses and employees", "Schools and students", and "Organizations and members". What if I want to just use it as a private person -- affiliated with no business, school, or non-profit organization?
Undaunted, I continued exploring. I clicked on one of the links, even though it didn't directly apply.
Fortunately, the next page had a "Compare versions and sign up" version, which I followed to http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions_spe.html .
From there, I could see that the Standard version was the one I wanted, since it is free.
During the signup process, it asked for some information about my domain/organization:
To get started with Google Apps Standard Edition, we'll need you to fill out a few details about you and your organization.
Information for tylerrick.com
Number of users *
Account Administrator
First name * (e.g., Jane or John)
Last name * (e.g., Doe or Smith)
Email address * Please enter a valid email address.
Phone * (e.g., 123-456-7890)
Country/Region *
Job title (e.g., President or Systems Administrator)
Organization Information
Organization name (e.g., FrobozzCo or Tyrell Corporation)
Type [Business/.../Education/Non-profit/Personal/Other] [not required]
Size of organization
Does your organization currently provide email accounts? Yes/No
If so, what does your organization use for email? (e.g., Microsoft Exchange)
I had to prove that I owned the domain by placing an .html file on my web site for them. They claimed that verification could take up to 48 hours. In my experience, it took about 10 seconds.
Then I followed Google's directions and went to Dreamhost and added a custom MX record: 10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM
Then I went back to Google and told them I had completed changing my MX records. They said:
Updating Google servers... This may take up to 1 hour to complete.
We are updating Google servers to enable email for your domain.
[edit]
http://d0rk.org/2007/04/17/i-love-gmail/.
...
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.
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.
...
Now to get all of my old mail on my Gmail account. [...]
...
http://5thirtyone.com/archives/218.
[...] I prefer the familiar interface of my personal Gmail account. Fortunately, Google Hosted dropped an invite allowing me to register and setup 5ThirtyOne for the hosted [Gmail] service. I’ll walk through the painless transfer [DreamHost to Google], basic customizations, and final thoughts.
...
[edit] Personal thoughts on Google Hosted
All the features and functionality of a standard Gmail account wrapped in a nice “custom” package. My personal score pitting the two against each other:
- Paid hosting vs. Google Hosted: +1 Non-Google.
- Security and privacy wise, an included email or dedicated email host, is a far wiser choice. No peaking bots scanning emails for targeted text ads and the like. As my good friend from UNEASY put it: [using Google] is like letting someone always look in your bedroom window.
- Interface & intuitiveness: +1 Google
- Once you familiarize yourself with the standard keyboard shortcuts [or Gmail Macros GM userscript], there’s really no going back to something like SquirrelMail. Keyboard shortcuts, filters, and labels aside, with the power of Google search under the hood, is a comparison of SquirrelMail even necessary?
- Spam filtering: +1 Google
- Who’s going to deny the fact that Gmail’s Spam filters are one of the toughest in the industry? As stated earlier, emails sent to my domain were configured to forward to my personal account. Despite having DH’s built in spam & virus filter active, spam messages continued to slip through. Thankfully Gmail’s spam filter cleaned up the mess that DH filters dropped.
- User account quotas: +1 non-Google
- [...] Google Hosted are limited to a paltry 2GB. [I think mine actually says it is 6+GB]
- Playing all might root: +1 Google
- Setting up separate users with Google Hosted is a breeze. Specify a users name, email address, and assign a random password. Period. No unnecessary clicks, or drop down menus. Remember the username limit for standard Gmail accounts? Non-existent. You can create single letter / numeral accounts like z@domainname.com.
- POP usage and bandwidth: +1 Google
- Similar to standard Gmail users, Google Hosted users have POP access for retrieving mail. Bandwidth usage due to file retrieval may not dent most users bandwidth allotment, but every MB counts right? Why utilize your own bandwidth when the stuff grows on trees on the Googleplex farm?
Google wins 4 to 2 in my book.
There’s one more thing with this… You cannot send or receive files over 10MB - that’s their data limit per email.
[edit] http://rick.cogley.info/blog/index.php
http://rick.cogley.info/blog/index.php?id=4961479062255821102.
[edit] So the Flow Goes
Someone sends mail to you@your.corporate.com, which is forwarded to your private@Gmail account. If it is a virus or spam, Gmail's filters for those will act upon the mail. If it passes through the gauntlet, Mail.app downloads the mail, runs another Spam check and processes any rules you have set, then copies the mail into your Inbox folder. You reply to the mail and Mail.app copies your reply into your local Sent Items folder. Because you have BCC'ed yourself, the reply gets routed to you@your.corporate.com again, forwarded to Gmail, and Gmail's filters act upon it, noticing it is From: you. The mail is automagically copied into the Gmail Sent Mail folder (tagged as Sent).
...
[edit] Decision Summary
During this setup, we made the following decisions:
- Use the IMAP protocol not POP, because IMAP allows you to access your mail from multiple IMAP clients.
- Use your ISP's SMTP server to resolve the Outlook "on behalf of" problem, and use a Gmail Filter to make sure your mails get put in the Sent Items folder. The Gmail filter will skip the Inbox, and archive the mail from yourself immediately.
- BCC yourself to make sure the aforementioned filter always fires, putting sent mail in its place.
...
It's a little bit complex, but it is nice to have a robust backend with great anti-virus and anti-spam measures, plus a large amount of storage space, for free. Kudos to Google for giving us such a wonderful service.
http://www.z-oc.com/blog/2007/06/manage-all-your-email-accounts-with-gmail/.
Yet using public email addresses is a big problem because if one day you change to another service you will have the headache of telling everybody about your new address. Having your own domain and your email within it is much better.
You may also want to handle old email accounts within Gmail transparently.
In this article, I will show you how to configure Gmail to manage multiple accounts in a transparent way and using your own domain email address or any other you may like.
...
Gmail says “Search, don’t Sort” and by all means this is a good idea and they also tell you not to ever delete a message again, which is interesting, at least for the messages that have any value.
But if you do this you probably have copious amounts of email in a single archive and while sorting is not the solution, Labels and Filters can give you a hand with all this.
If you Manage all your emails accounts in Gmail then for sure you need further help by now to manage you gather-all Gmail account.
In either case, you might find useful to use Labels to organize them as or need a second Gmail account as .
This post will explain
- Why search is better than sort
- How to set labels
- How to use filters
- How to use Filters to set Labels as suggested by Peter Cruickshank (See comment)
- How to use handle multiple Gmails accounts as suggested by Pramod (see his comment)
- As a bonus I even tell you how to deal with server backups sent by mail to you
...
[edit] Search, don’t sort
Why searching is better that sorting? I would say it is for three reasons.
1. The first one is that it is just too hard to know in advance what kind of organizing system you will need in a year time, sometimes even in a month time.
If you have a powerful search system you don’t need to think of this, you will only worry about it when you need to find that archived email.2. The second one is that in traditional mail archives you can only sort an email in one folder. You might have a folder “Funnies” and a folder “Mom”, and you will have to decide either time where to put the funnies your mom sends you.
Also you have to be consistent, because as your archive grows it will be hard to know where that funny your Mom sent you was archived in.
[edit] Labels: Just like folders but with search properties
A label in Gmail is pretty much a predefined search.
You can find a Labels box in the sidebar on the left, in green, just below the “Quick Contacts” section.
Say you frequently search for email your Mom sent you, well, you can create a label Mom and tag all email from her with this label.
...
[edit] SMTP vs. IMAP
http://5thirtyone.com/archives/218.
POP connections only allow you to use one client. Once I download messages to my laptop, I can’t get them on my home or work computers. The work around was to automatically forward all messages to another mailbox. One computer checks the original mailbox and the other checks the “forward to” mailbox. [Good idea!] Luckily, I can still share SMTP so replies all look like they come from the original mailbox.
