Review of GMail for Your Domain

DevanJedi writes "Google recently started offering GMail hosted email service, with 25 free 2 GB email accounts, for universities and beta-testing private domains. Science Addiction has a review of the GMail for Your Domain service and its features including screenshots and speculation on future Google free and paid hosting efforts."

Old news but welcome

[commanderfoxtrot]

This was published ages ago; anyone know though how big the beta is?

One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address.

It's to do with GMail including your gmail address in the headers of the email (the Sender: header?).

Wow

[heatdeath]

This is actually something that microsoft came out with before google. Weird.

I gave it a try

[kkamrani]

I gave it a try for my domain, anthropology.net [anthropology.net], and aside from somewhat of a hurdle getting my registrar to use Google's MX records, I have nothing but praise for the GMail hosting service. It really offers me and my site a professional web mail service.

Although, I must say I swapped back out because they don't seem to have a catch-all email feature, like *@anthropology.net

Mirror if slashdotted

[DevanJedi]

Mirror if slashdotted [galaxyfaraway.com], enjoy!

not limited to 25 accounts.

[kasek]

the # of accounts is said to be based off of what info you provided when you signed up. we were in the process of setting this up at work, and while i dunno how many accounts we were given, but i know it was more than 25.

I've tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was fortunate enough to get in on the beta test of this service. Setup was as easy as could be expected. You need to know how to set up MX records for your domain but thats about it.

Runs almost as smoothly as a regular google mail account. There are some hiccups but I guess thats what you get when using an early beta. I like it enough that I've moved my regular mail to this service though.

Outlook, not Gmail

[DragonHawk]

"One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address."

That's really more of an Outlook issue. GMail is adhering to the standards. "From" identifies the nominal author(s) of a message. "Sender" identifies the specific, single agent which originated a message. See RFC-2822, Section 3.6.2.

It's hardly GMail's fault that Outlook presents that information in such a funny looking way.

Re:Cache / Mirror

[Professor_UNIX]

Site's running a little slowly so here's the NYUD link, just in case ;)

That link doesn't work for me but the Mirrordot [mirrordot.org] link is quite snappy.

Re:I gave it a try

[outZider]

That's a Good Thing(tm), really. Catchalls are huge spam traps. If you end up getting a dictionary attack, every address they try is set to 'valid'. ;)

Re:Wow

[utlemming]

Yeah, but there is no comparision between the products. Microsoft's sucks hard. You turn over control of your domain name to them -- so you have to use their stuff. You just can't point your mx records at them.

Google allows retention of domain control, you just point your mx record at them.

Microsoft is going for Joe Sixpack who wants to have branded email. Google is going for the bigger guys that really know what there doing and what they want.

Slashdot accepted my review, just hasn't published it yet. Here it is: http://utlemming.blogstream.com/ [blogstream.com]

To sum it up, two different services, one sucks hard and the other is pretty good.

Re:Wow

[heatdeath]

Google allows retention of domain control, you just point your mx record at them.

Microsoft is going for Joe Sixpack who wants to have branded email. Google is going for the bigger guys that really know what there doing and what they want.

No, I'm talking about live.com custom domains, not live office. Live office is for joe sixpack; live.com custom domains do exactly what gmail does.

If slashdot publishes your review, slashdot sucks. =P

my experience gmail hosting my email

[Not Public]

(feel free to let me know if I'm missing something that mitigates or eliviates these issues)

a) I'm sorry, but I'd like some better means of archiving and backing up my email than accessing it via pop3 client. especially as admin- I'd need some means of doing this in bulk.

b) ads. while I know it could be worse.. I've been running my own webmail (iloha/squirrel) via imap. no ads. I just like not seeing them, and don't know how much I'd be willing to pay to not see them against my previous setup.

c) visuals. I previously had much more flexibility and better integration with other site/app/branding. sorry a little 149x58-ish pic doesn't really work as "branding" an entire web presence.

d) bulk import. I don't want to leave my mass of imap folders/clutter/organization behind!

e) hosted domains don't get the same "ever growing" storage as normal gmail accounts. small thing, but it seems kinda silly to go with a domain via gmail, but not to get all the gmail "features".

f) change scares me. there are several "features" hinted at, that aren't in play now... like multiple levels/account types, additional services, etc... am I going to get dragged into additional "features I don't want?" are some of my current features going to be moved to "non-free" account levels? I wish I could let it handle all my domain's accounts but my three main... keep those safe during the testing period until things stabalize... assuming that this beta period doesn't last the next 5 years.

in the end, I know- these are paltry things, and for someone who owns nothing but a domain name.. gmail hosting their mail may not be a bad thing.

Best Feature. Re:Old news but welcome

[Forge]

The author dose not state the absolute greatest feature of this service.

However it's listed right there on the Gmail for your Domain home page.

  "Gmail for your domain is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software for you to install or maintain."

Having maintained Email servers before I can tell you that even the most elegant server software and the most robust Hardware will still give you the occasional headache.

Not as bad as Exchange on a "SCSI cluster". That's when you use a cluster capable SCSI enclosure like the Dell PowerVault 220s and cluster capable RAID card like PERC3/DC controller, To provide failover, redundancy and high availability (You know. All the right buzzwords).

Old news

[brokencomputer]

I wrote a review more than a month ago [wrongplanet.net] and submitted it to slashdot. The problem I had with Gmail was that I was used to having my mail locally, so I could read it no matter what. Google didn't offer an imap or even pop3 option.

screenshots

[hyperstation]

i put up a few screenshots [trustknot.net] on this yesterday.

No catch-all accounts

[isnoop]

My biggest gripe is that they don't yet offer a catch-all account. If a mailbox doesn't exist, don't give you the option to catch it in a specific mailbox instead of bouncing it.

Catch-alls are how a lot of people who own their own domains provide unique email addresses to every site they visit so they know if someone sold their address and can block it with ease.

Re:Old news but welcome

[sprins]

One of the main problems with GMail is the "on behalf of" thing when trying to masquerade under a valid alternative email address.

I'd say one of the mail problems with GMail is the fact that their outbound SMTP relayers are off-and-on listed in the dnsbl.sorbs.net blackhole. This means mail you send out may get blocked by receiving servers that check this blackhole.

I'm regularly getting these kinds of messages when I send out mail and that really sucks:

PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Service unavailable; Client host [64.233.166.180] blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Spam Received See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?64.233.166.180 [sorbs.net]

Re:my experience gmail hosting my email

[Not Public]

oh, and i want encryption & digital signing capabilities...

as long as I'm dreaming...

Re:Wow

[zenwarrior]

I still have my hotmail account from pre-microsoft. It's now so overloaded with spam that I only check it once a month or so to sift through the garbage...

Interesting. I also have a Hotmail account that dates back to the internet's Copper Wire Age. However, several months ago it went from being a spam magnet to one of the cleanest free web-mail accounts I have.

Even better, as one of the ancient and original Hotmail accounts, it has [free] POP3 access -- a Hotmail option now only available by paying for either MSN Hotmail Plus or MSN Premium.

BTW, the only [known?] way to determine if your basic free Hotmail account is POP3-accessible is by trying it. Use your full e-mail address as the username (e.g., [e-mail]) and your normal Hotmail password. The server's address is: http://services.msn.com/svcs/hotmail/httpmail.asp [msn.com] .

If it works for you as it does for me, enjoy!

Thoughts and images

[se7en11]

Our website just got signed up this week and we're loving it so far. There are a few improvements I would like to see though.

1) There is currently no option to change the colors of the UI. Yes, you can change the colors of the little login box, but nothing else. Our site has a black background with dark orange and burgundy, so the switch is like night and day. (litteraly)

2) I was not able to find a good way to add a header on top of the GMail hosted site. It would be nice to include some navigational buttons to get you back into the site. Currently, we just created a subdomain and pointed that to a directory that meta refreshes the page to our Google hosted site. (If anyone has any advice, please let me know)

3) Login directly from domain. (again if anyone has any insight on this, please let me know)

4) Manually having to add each user is going to be a pain, but a small price to pay I guess.

Besides those things, I'm lovin` it!

Here are a couple images of the interface if you haven't seen them yet: main admin page [linein.org], user listing [linein.org], adding new email [linein.org], domain settings [linein.org], change login color [linein.org], bult account update [linein.org]

- John

Re:I gave it a try

[Tim C]

Not only that, but spammers tend to fake the From: headers on their emails. A couple of months ago some lowlife scum happened on my domain; the flood has subsided a little, but at its height I was getting a couple of thousand mails a day.

That may not seem like much to some of you, but:

1) my domain has no website at it and gives no indication of being in use (other than resolving to a valid IP)
2) previous to that, I got maybe a couple of dozen crap mails a week

The pattern was actually reasonably interesting. At first they were all bounces, then gradually the number of bounces started to drop but I started getting spam to some of the fake addresses. Now I get bounces, spams, out of office autoreplies, the occasional indignant mail from people pissed off with spam, lots of "confirmation required" emails and even the occasional virus.

Catchalls are very useful too - when registering with a website I can give them an address that identifies them, so if I get spam to it, I know who leaked my details and can act accordingly. It's just a shame that some spammers are such lying, deceitful shits.

got one

[wwmedia]

I got it for one of my biger domains yesterday, so far its almost the same as Gmail except the address is [e-mail]

took a few minutes to point the mx records, the admin control panel is cool enough, you can add your companies logo instead of gmails, batch create acounts by uploading a list ;)

so far im fairly impressed (fairplay to google) pity its only 25emails i have 40000members on one site alone who will be interested

Re:I gave it a try

[kwark]

There is no such problem (at this moment) if you do greylisting BEFORE a spamassassin check. The python greylistd filters thousands of messages in the same time SA does 1.

Re:sorbs blocks gmail

[jbx]

> I'd say one of the mail problems with GMail is the fact that their outbound SMTP relayers
> are off-and-on listed in the dnsbl.sorbs.net blackhole. This means mail you send out may
> get blocked by receiving servers that check this blackhole.
>
> I'm regularly getting these kinds of messages when I send out mail and that really sucks:
>
> PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 554 Service unavailable; Client host [64.233.166.180]
> blocked using dnsbl.sorbs.net; Spam Received See: http://www.sorbs.net/lookup.shtml?64.233.166.180 [sorbs.net]

How is that a problem with GMail? Seems to me it's a problem with sorbs.

sorbs has suggested to GMail that GMail should expose the IP address from which the message originated; that way sorbs could block by real IP instead of GMail's mailing agent's IP. GMail has responded that to expose the IP of the sender would violate the privacy of the sender. sorbs responds, basically, "well, IP address is how we work. If you only give us one IP address to work with, that's the one we list as blackholed." And so they list the GMail outbound IP addresses as blocked.

More saliently, sorbs says:

sorbs does NOT block email, websites or the Internet.
sorbs is NOT CAPABLE of blocking email, websites or the Internet.

What you need to do is contact the mail server that (after communicating with sorbs) decided to block your mail. The only way sorbs will ever change their policy of "you must violate the privacy of your users or we will block your mail" is of enough of their users complain about it.