Google announced Google Apps for Your Domain a while ago. Using per-domain branded Google apps, you could pick up services like email, IM and calendar all for free, hosted by Google. Sounded like a good idea but I’ve always hosted my own webDAV calendars and email (qmail/courier-imap) and been happy with my self-sufficiency. Until recently.
Image spam, server instability and DNS issues started to really make my willisbros.net email less than reliable. Plus, since I’m moving on from the statehouse position, having a reliable method of contact is pretty important. I decided to give another look at Google Apps for Willisbros.net. I read the service agreement, FAQs, and forum feedback and everything looked kosher with one major exception: Google mail is POP3 only. No IMAP. This was almost a deal-breaker for me.
I wanted to benefit from the reliability and accessibility of having Google host my willisbros.net mail, but I didn’t want to give up IMAP flexibility. So here’s what I did:
- Setup Google Apps for Willisbros.net, changed the MX record and setup necessary accounts
- Went to my legacy IMAP server and setup fetchmail to retrieve my gmail via POP3
- New mail is downloaded by fetchmail (ssl’d) into my IMAP inbox where my mail client can access it and I can file it into my “archive” folder or delete it
- Mail stays on the gmail server after being pop’d but is automatically dumped into the online Archive folder after being pop’d
- Uploaded six years’ worth of archive messages from my IMAP archive folder to gmail using Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader
Now my local mail client’s IMAP folder structure and contents mirror that of my web-based gmail. Brilliant!
Granted, this only works if you have an IMAP server somewhere that you can use but i’d imagine you could setup courier-imap on pretty much anything and, as long as you’re cool with the minimal folder implementation (INBOX, Archive, Trash and Spam) you’re pretty much set. The only fly in the ointment here is that there’s no synchronization between my local mail client’s “Sent Mail” and mail I send through the gmail interface. Not that big of a deal, but it does prevent this solution from being perfect.
I’ve been very pleased so far with letting the good folks at Google worry about my mail reliability. They’re much better at it than I am. And their spam filters kickass over anything I’ve ever been able to eek out of spamassassin.
Hey Jim, (first time long time willisbros reader) I have been using google’s beta mailservers for many months and so far and I am fairly pleased with it. Actually, it’s free so that makes me very happy. I only managed to lock myself out once and I don’t think it was my fault. They (some server script) told me that when you either pop a massive amount of email or delete a massive amount of spam it triggers some type of alert and they will lock you out. So there is a balance between deleting your spam faster (but not too fast) then you get it. Googles spam filters catch about 80% and if you run spamassassin (why wouldn’t you) that usually picks up the rest.
One other little trick I have just picked up on with my gmail spam account is if you want to see who is selling your email address to do the following.
Suppose you want to sign up at say macy’s for coupies or something and you are worried that they will sell off your address. When you fill in your email address put in macys+username@gmail.com. Gmail will silently ignore the macys+ part and still deliver the mail to your account. So if you recv some sort of spam in your mailbox with macys+username@gmail.com from anyone else but macy’s then you know that they have commited a virtual sin against you and you need to retaliate somehow.
Best of luck in NJ btw.
@tom: yo!
thx for the 2cents.
i checked out the “plus” addressing stuff. Way useful. I think you have the address inverted though. It should be $account_name + $foo @ gmail.com to make that work.
A few more cool gmail tips here.