Google Apps as Emergency Backup Mail Service
Something broke on my home network and my mail server went offline last night. Unfortunately, because I’m in the middle of a divorce, I can’t go over to the house and fixed it. After registering for EC2 and starting the processes of setting up a Amazon Machine Image (AMI) I remembered that Google Apps can be configured to be your mail system.
The reason this was fresh in my mind is that I have a client who is planning to move their mail services to Google Apps since they use GMail as a front-end for their mail system anyway.
It seemed like a good idea since Google Apps has a 30 day free trial and I only had my own email to consider; it’s basically a low risk, high return experiment.
Setting up Google Apps is going through a registration and Google Checkout then verifying that you are the owner of your domain. You also have to “activate” email for Google Apps which was, IIRC, clicking a button, setting up your DNS records and clicking another button.
Anyway, I updated my DNS MX records and reloaded the zone file then sent a couple of test messages and voila! It just worked. I did get messages after submitting the forms stating that it would take 48 hours to do the domain verification, but things worked almost immediately. All in all it took about 20 minutes to get it up and running.
I have about 190 aliases (I create a new one every time I register somewhere online to track spam) so I used a wildcard alias on Google to catch those. And I also use POP3 in Outlook as my front-end; works great in comparison with IMAPS which apparently Outlook hates since performance is atrocious.
One thing I also noticed immediately is that Google’s spam filter is far better than what I use which is a combo of server side filters (spamassasin, razor, postfix, postgrey, etc.) and Outlook’s built in filters.
The sum total is that it was pretty painless and it solved my problem in short order. Whether I stick with it long term, is another issue altogether. I’ve always had and recommend to my clients that they keep their email on their own servers for security. I’m not sure if I can get comfortable with the all seeing eye of Google on my email.
