Using Gmail on your Domain
A little while back, Google announced it was hosting San Jose City College’s email. Prior to that, rumors started circulating that Google would be licensing its Gmail technology to others due to clues in the code.
Honestly, I could not see a downside to this arrangement (paranoid delusions are not considered). Most college students don’t want to fiddle with email client configuration. A webmail interface is perfect for campus wide availability. The over 2 gigabytes of storage space works great for students to send files back and forth on a regular basis. Because it’s maintained by Google, it also means it’ll be available to students even after they graduate. And yes, I am still a little bitter that U-Mass is too damn cheap to give lifetime email addresses to graduates.
Apparently, this arrangement is a beta test of sorts. Google followed that announcement up with a small testing program for others to host the email for a domain. Not only do they supply Gmail accounts, but they supply an administrative interface for the owner of that domain. That’s pretty slick and considering the apparent price (free), a pretty good deal.
I’m going to try it out for the domain I set up for my family as ideally, I’d like them all using Gmail because otherwise, I have a feeling they’ll constantly change email address as well as lose their emails. Should I get picked, I’ll share my experiences, but I expect they’ll be positive.
When we talked about this the other night the idea of the lifetime email account hadn’t even occured to me, but that is another excellent part of this idea.
I was lucky enough to go to a school that offerred a lifetime forwarding address, but you still need an address to forward to, and since I’ve never really used it I know how annoying it is to have to tell eveyone you know that you have a new email address. That’s one of the main reasons I use Gmail right now.
Well, in all fairness, U-Mass does supply a free forwarder (username@alumni.umass.edu), but I hardly consider that a solution because as you said, you still need something to forward to.
Keeping a permanent address is part of the reason I keep my .Mac account and why I also bought my derik.name domain name.
As a sidenote, I can host unlimited domain names with my Dreamhost account, so if you buy something, I can set it up to forward to your gmail.
google already lets you send and receive emails from any domain you have control over. set the domain email address to point to your gmail account. then, in gmail, go to Settings>Accounts and add an account for the domain address you are using. you can also make it default, so that everytime you send an email from gmail, the return address (and reply-to: — everything), will automatically be your domain address, not your gmail address.
whether or not you make it the default, you can select which account to send from (via drop-down menu) everytime you compose a message or reply to one in gmail.
slick operation. -andrew
That’s true, and I forgot to mention it here (I did in the entry I did for Macuser). The difference here is that the domain owner doesn’t get the administrative controls supplied through this program.