I remember when Howard & Gus were talking up Gmail when it came out. A gig of storage for life free they said. It was a closed beta so you had to have friends who had an in get you an invite. In a short period of time (shorter than I expected) I had an invite. I was like why do I need this? I want and use my own domain’s personal email. Why would I want @gmail.com in my address? I mean the idea was very interesting but I didn’t think it was for me.
Not too much time went by and people were still talking about Gmail. I figured I need to use my invite so I can at least secure the username that I like to use, so I did. As predicted I haven’t used Gmail that much. I do route mail to it that I don’t want in my regular mailbox’s, but I could go weeks without logging into the account. That was until a month or so ago.
Recently Google offered Google Apps for free. Google Apps is a collection of web applications that you can use with your own domain. They have cool features like Google Talk, Calendar, etc. What got me interested was Gmail. Now they offer a Gmail front end that you can use for your own mail domain. Better yet it is free for personal use. I get 100 accounts with as of this writing 5.8 gigs of space. Now this information on its own would be interesting but nothing more. In fact when I first read about Google Apps I setup a mail domain pointing to the system and played around with it, but nothing more. I like to get my mail via IMAP, and Google didn’t offer that. The final clincher for me was when they announced that Google Apps would support IMAP, also for free. For the past week I have been routing some mail to my domain I had them hosting mail for, and so far I haven’t had any hiccups (fingers crossed). Because of that I am beginning the task of routing all my mail to Google Apps.
I can be a cynic. I know that, but I am very impressed by how this tool has evolved. I am even eying the Premier version of the service to get some of the more advanced features. I am not sure if I need them so the free service is fine for now. It is just too bad that I wasted some money moving to a new email hosting provider in September. They are great, but they can’t compete with 5gigs free IMAP storage.