Google Apps rocks!

Recently, I got a new server. While trying to get the email handling installed, I became very frustrated. Not only did managing the email consume a majority of my server administration time, but it took a lot of bandwidth just dealing with the spam I received. Because I’ve had my main domain (acucore.com) for over 7 years, it gets a large amount of spam.

But with the introduction of IMAP for Google Email (including their free gmail.com email service), Google has opened up a whole new world for me. In addition to the gmail.com service, Google has a service called Google Apps (previously Google Apps for Your Domain). It allows you to use several Google services (including email, calendaring and docs) with your own domain. This is ideal for small businesses.

Here’s the huge benefit. They handle all the spam! Since converting to Google, my false negatives (spam that got through the filters) has gone from 10 or 15 a day to 1 or 2. It’s been really nice. And to top it off, my server doesn’t have to spend bandwidth or processing time handling that spam. The spam filtering was always my biggest consumer of processing power.

And of course, the coolest part about it…. it’s free! Well, at least the basic features are free – which is all most companies need.

Here’s a sneaky tip — if you have an existing IMAP solution and you want to import all the emails from your old IMAP folders, you can sign-up for the premium account for a 30 day trial period. This gives you access to the IMAP import tool which will suck over an entire IMAP account. Once you are done with your conversion, just cancel the premium account before the 30 days and you never get charged.