Got my beta invitation earlier this week. Set stuff up this evening. My domain’s email is now handled by Gmail (Gmail for Your domain last mentioned here). I had signed up for the beta early February and just been patiently waiting.
Switching over to GfYD (boy, now there’s an awkward looking acronym) is really quite simple — especially if you have some control over your DNS MX records. And I do, courtesy of the awesome zoneedit.com folks. Essentially, I just had to switch over the MX records to point at a bounc of possible/potential/definitive Gmail servers. Took about 5 minutes.
User accounts are pretty simple to setup. Looks like I get 50 to start with. Each account can also have nicknames associated with it. Nicknames are just another address associated with that particular mailbox. I think nicknames count against the 50, but not positive. Regardless, for my little business, 50 will be plenty. Once a user is setup, it looks just like regular ol’ Gmail from the web. 2GB, natch.
I configured the Pop3 support to continue using my huge Outlook file. Setting up the pop3 support was pretty straightforward. The help file shows the typical setup instructions. I had to modify those a wee bit to get it to actually work with the hosted flavor. Nothing too tricky, just have to remember to use your domain name in the email address and not “you@gmail.com”.
What haven’t I figured out yet? Don’t see to see an option for a “catch all” address. Haven’t determined if everything that doesn’t match goes to the “admin” account or it it is rejected. (A quick informal test would appear to indicate that unmatched addresses are rejected.) I would love to see options to import saved email from other mail clients. Hell, I’d pay for that service. The FAQ hints that maybe someday… That would be huge.
What am I excited about? Letting this be someone else’s headache — especially the anti-spam aspects! Seriously, that’s golden. Searching is a big plus too. Universal access to my email is a minor plus as well.
Privacy concerns?� I probably should have some, but ya know… email isn’t that hard to pull off the wire. If anyone is after my email and has government type access to the ‘net, they got my email. Regardless of where it is hosted, I’ll use encryption if necessary so… meh. Doesn’t much matter to me.
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March 23rd, 2006 
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I’d be sold if Googled offered IMAP access to Gmail…
I’ll concede that IMAP would be sweet. For now, I’ve set up so that mail I pull with POP3 goes to archive. That way, I can find it again via the web interface if necessary.
But after just one day, I’m pretty enthused about the spam-blocking capabilities. Made a huge difference in the amount of junk I got the last 24 hours.
i am trying to setup as you did.
what did your mx records look like in zoneedit?
Something like:
mydomain.com ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 0
mydomain.com ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 5
mydomain.com ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM 10
mydomain.com ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 20
mydomain.com ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 20
mydomain.com ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 20
mydomain.com ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM 20
Hi – great blog and sound advice/fino. I’ve tried configuring my MX records on zoneEdit so that I can also utilise GfyD. I currently have http://www.hecktor.com signed up for the beta of GfyD but when I try to enter the MX records Google have given me (below), zoneEdit says they “are not valid”
Any ideas please?
THanks
MX Server address Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 1
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 5
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 10
Try taking the trailing . off each address, so:
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM – priority 1
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM – priority 5
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM – priority 5
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM – priority 10
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM – priority 10
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM – priority 10
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM – priority 10
Just an update
There is a catchall setting.
It;s under that advance setting in the domain settings in ur admin dashboard.
Hey Max, thanks for that.
[...] About seven months ago I wrote about my switch to “Gmail for my Domain.” At some point since then it became “Google Apps for Your Domain” but since I really don’t use the other apps… I’ve had a some recent comments and emails about that old post so it seemed like a good time to jot down an update on how things have been going. [...]
Hi, I`ve a problem and please may be u can help me… I`ve an accont in mydoman.com, and I`ve http://www.example.com and I don`t know the values to put in MX to use email account with gmail. Please, could u help me?
Daniel – have a look at http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33352
[...] to sign-up to the enterprise plan for my company. I personally have been using the free version since last March and have been quite happy with it. Since we definitely need to make some email changes at the [...]
This is surely too late for Simon, but others reading this might like to know that the MX records should be in lower case, and this is probably why he was having a problem
The period at the end is normally needed.
The list of given by Simon is correct