Google Apps for domains

[Jonathan Duncan]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Michael Torrie wrote:

> Has anyone on this list tried out Google Apps for domains?  The basic
> level of service is free (ad-revenues for google) and has a lot of
> advantages over running my own server.  I'm thinking seriously about
> using them with my domain.  Mainly because I don't want to give out
> e-mail accounts to family and then have the burden of maintaining a
> server for years to come.  Google Apps gives me the freedom to ditch my
> server entirely if I wanted to.  It also gives nice features like jabber
> IMing with using my domain, document sharing, etc.
>
> Here's my dilemma.  I don't want to give up the ability to run my own
> mail server.  Google's system is nice, but I'd like to use it in
> addition to my current server. That way my family members can just use
> google and it's web client while I use my own server with imap.  I
> thought of several ways to do this.
>
> First I could have Google pick up everything with the MX record
> (recommended by Google).  Then I could run fetchmail on my server to
> bring down mail for imap users through the pop gateway.
>
> Or I could set my server as the primary MX, and then have postfix bounce
> all mail through to google's servers for users I don't want to host on
> my server.  I could even set Google's servers as alternates in the MX
> record in case of outages, and then also run the fetchmail to bring in
> mail I missed.
>
> The second option is complicated, but should work.  The main reason to
> have mail hit my server first is to allow for greylisting, which I've
> found to be extremely effective at reducing spam by an order of
> magnitude.  By fetching my mail through pop from google's servers, I
> loose that tool.  I still have spamassassin and dspam, and also google's
> own spam filters, which may be enough.
>
> Any thoughts or recommendations?  Has anyone used google apps?
>

I have been trying it out on one of my own domains and I just set up my 
brother's domain on it.  He likes it.  The mail thing is nice, but as has 
been mentioned, I still like running my own servers.  Have you thought 
about getting a different domain and letting your family use that on 
Google?  If you do pay, they allow you to choose which addresses you 
control and which ones they control, if I understand correctly.

Jonathan