AKem.blog

This week, I switched my email address over to Google Apps from my 1&1 mail server. 1&1 provides a very half-way decent mail service, but I’ve found Gmail to be a far superior mail service, namely it’s handling of spam. Basically, it gives you a bunch of services available at your domain, like akem.ws (which isn’t your domain). So, you can get a Gmail account that is you@yourdomain.whatevs.

Previously what I’ve been doing was to have my akem.ws email forward to my Gmail account, and have a setup to send messages from Gmail on behalf of me. Sometimes, it appears as you would expect, from email@akem.ws. Other times, it comes from me@gmail.com on behalf of email@akem.ws, or some other obscure pattern. This all started because I wanted to avoid that.

I signed up for the Google Apps Standard Edition. It’s the free version with limited features, and less storage. It’s ideal for my one-man operation. It gives me access to my akem.ws email through the Gmail interface, as well as providing me with a convenient way to login, instead of having to keep finding my 1&1 webmail access point when I, for some reason, don’t feel like using my iPhone.

It also give you access to Calendars, Google Docs, Gchat, and something else I won’t use. I can access the apps through super secret sub-domains on my site. My main site remains unaffected, and still runs properly from my 1&1 host. There are options to use some website builder tools to make a site and publish akem.ws from this, but I would feel sad and defeated if it came to that. After all, this is my chosen profession.

I’m still using MobleMe to sync contacts, calendars, bookmarks, etc. across my growing number of Apple products, so I’m basically only using the Gmail and Docs portion of the site. If only there were a way to combine these two things, it would make things super simple, almost too simple.

If you’re thinking about Google Apps, I’d say give it a try. It’s easy to setup, and there’s almost no down time. I did have a few emails that got bounced back, but I was able to set up a mail forward from 1&1 to forward to my personal Gmail account, which in turn was being checked by POP3 from my Google Apps account, until the MX records had properly propagated. But, it all works now, and I have an easy and convenient way to manage email and docs (for client information and such).