Google Apps Mail
I don't mean your personal Gmail account, or an iPhone app for Gmail.
I mean using Google Apps as an invisible email provider for your small business or even large business. For instance, when you send mail to me at kk@kk.org, that mail is processed by Google Apps Mail. Same for mail to anyone else here at kk.org, or Quantified Self, etc. Behind the scenes of my own domain names Google does the mail.
You can think of this as a custom Gmail account. It gives you several advantages.
* Google does a fantastic job of filtering spam. It gets 95%, with no false positives. (I then apply a second Baysian filter with SpamSieve, to give me almost zero spam and zero false spam. For me there is no spam problem. Gone!)
* While I normally read my mail on my "desktop" client, I can access my mail on the road from any computer in the world (with the usual precautions) by logging onto Google Apps (not the Gmail url).
* I have an indefinite backup of my mail on Google's servers, worry free. I've used this backup more than once.
* Yet I still retain my own domain named email without it being a generic Gmail account. You can run yourbigcompany.com through Google Mail Apps.
* I don't have to run a mail server or keep software and security updated.
* Once I set it up (five minutes) this setup applies to everyone in my office/organization who also gets his/her mail at these domains.
* It's free.
Before Google starting offering this free "custom Gmail app" as part of their App suite including Google Docs and Google Calendar (which are also fantastic cool tools), I gained some of these similar results by forwarding all my mail through my free ordinary Gmail account and then back to me at my own servers. That hack worked, but this new custom mail app is much easier to setup, maintain and use. I first became aware of it when my wife's work (Genentech) moved their entire 10,000 employees' mail to a custom Google Apps system. Now you can too. It is part of the migration onto the "cloud," especially for small businesses.
Google Apps Standard edition is free. Larger institutions and corporations switching their email over to Google Apps may want the paid Premium Edition ($50 per user per year) with more perks, features, storage and support.
Available from Google
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Tim Gier
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I just set it up & linked it to my wordpress.com blog too. Easy-peasy.
Deane
We've used Google Apps for Domains for two years, and will never go back. Spam has been utterly eliminated, and Google Calendar is light years better than Microsoft Exchange.
We have people using (1) the Web interface, (2) Microsoft Outlook, (3) Mac Mail, and (4) Evolution across PC, Mac, and Linux platforms. GMail works with them all.
Daniel Howard
If only Google applications supported Google Apps! I have used Apps for years, and my Android-based HTC G1 logs into my hosted Gmail. Great! But then Google Voice, a new application, is developed, with no support for Apps login . . . so I get a message or a phone call via Google Voice and it can not identify the contact from my address book, because it doesn't support my address book.
Or I have to have a regular Gmail account to leave a comment on Blogger, or I can't use Picasa . . . Google Tracks . . . can't have custom map layers in the new mobile maps application.
Apps is pretty swank but it breaks your compatibility with Google. Best bet is to keep your domain to yourself, and forward the mail to Gmail, then you can use Google with one integrated account and not be screwed over every few months by a new incompatibility.
Damien
To be fair, it's not free. It's ad supported. And you'll notice that the ads are contextually linked to the content of you email messages. It does work well, and it's a very good service. You are, however, putting a lot of trust in Google and there are privacy issues related to that.
Matt
By the way, it should be "Bayesian" not "Baysian"
Robert
Here's a simple trick to remove google ads from e-mail messages.
http://thenextweb.com/2009/08/06/remove-ads-gmail-magic-words/
William
One caveat that it took me a lot of work to discover: Google doesn't support dashes for user-tagged addresses.
For example, suppose you were going to give the email kk@kk.org to buy some stuff from example.com. Some mail servers let you tag the address, so that you enter "kk-example.com@kk.org" or "kk+example.com@kk.org". Although it looks different, it still gets delivered to "kk@kk.org". But if they give the address to spammers, you can just filter out all mail to the tagged address.
Google Mail works with the version with a plus in it, but won't work with the dash variant. So if you have already give out a bunch of dash-based addresses like I have, you can't convert.
charlie
William, Google's using the oldest and most widely implemented form of sub-addressing. I don't know why some other email services re-invented an incompatible wheel. The plus thing has been in Eric Allman's "sendmail" program since before all these other email transports were invented. See here for technical details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address#Sub-addressing
RFC3598 and RFC5233 are proposed standards that will institutionalize the parsing of mail addresses using plus sign sub-addresses. Nobody's proposing anything similar for minuses, because they just duplicate already widely used semantics, and because dashes are widely used as regular characters in the name-part already.
You confusion is understandable, though, you've been led astray by software that didn't follow tradition, and the standards did not originally propose any semantics on the portion of an email address to the left of the "@" sing other than restricting the character set slightly. Email standards only "recommend" that addresses be case-insensitive to this day, although it's pretty obviously always been a good idea and should be required.
Incidentally, Google's doing some dumb stuff too. According to that wikipedia article, they are throwing away any dots in the left part of the address, and according to their own docs, they will not accept email with a trailing dot on the host name. I contacted Dr. Paul Mockapetris personally (Dr. John Postel being unfortunately deceased) and asked him if mail services should accept host/domain names with trailing dots and he said "they should not emit them but they should accept them" which is in line with standard practices world-wide. So, despite trailing dots being accepted in the hostname part of email addresses for half a century, and despite the people who wrote the standards telling Google they are wrong, Gmail still won't accept a trailing dot (as of the last time I checked). So Google is no paradigm of email behavior despite being in the clear on the plus/minus thing!
Phil Gyford
As an alternative suggestion... I've been using Tuffmail http://www.tuffmail.com/ as my email host for my domain for a couple of years and have been very pleased. Several friends recommended them to me.
The service is not free -- you pay more depending on the number of accounts and amount of storage you want, but it's extremely configurable (more so than I need or understand) and, so far, has been rock solid, with awesome spam filtering. I like to think that because it's the only thing the company does, they're very good at it. They have web mail clients so you can check your mail online too.
Doctor
I'd like to confirm that while Gmail *does* support tagged addresses, Google Apps Mail does *not*.
Other pet peeves:
- you can have nicknames and secondary domains, but you can't receive mail at nickname@secondary.domain
- you can open a Google account associated with your Google Apps address; some services will understand what's going on; but the two accounts and the two passwords are completely different
Awesome service otherwise.
Brandon Klein
Google Apps is the pinnacle of geekdom- ie, pockets of geeks, starting to make a collaborative online change to small businesses by convincing the leaders to implement it in their businesses. It is certainly a cost savings, and the precursor for people to understand what they can gain by moving some of their collaboration online. We are Collaboration King - http://collaborationking.com work around the world to promote this online collaboration- but not without changing some of the offline, or face to face collaboration. Has anyone invented the Google Apps of person to person collaboration? There are 1,000,000+ companies that claim to be 'collaborative' - but what does that mean- google has showed it online- who can prove it offline?
GmailPrime
Check out the soon to be released GmailPrime. www.gmailprime.com
GmailPrime: Bringing the Power of Gmail and Google Apps to your Desktop. The Ultimate Google Apps Desktop Application!
P.S. Great blog, for the past two years a week has not gone by without me visiting! I've found many great tools and information here! Keep it coming!
Andrew S
Plus sign sub-addresses fail on around 30% of web sites, and some major ones. I used to use them and encountered problems on major sites such as eBay and Dell.
Don't use them. Web programming is generally too incompetent to use them reliably.
Ben Keating
Glad we made the switch! (;