The Business of Software

Just wanted to share a positive experience.

Recently we have moved our tiny-ISV email hosting to Google Apps. And I must say, I love it. No more I have to worry about undelivered customer's mail, serial numbers, no more strugglin with our hosting company's email technicians, no more spam... Just love it. I've posted a blog entry on it, so if you want more details, please read - http://blog.jitbit.com/2008/01/google-apps-for-jitbit.html

IMHO, all mISV-ers should consider moving email from their hosting companies (and/or virtual dedicated servers) to Google. Really worth a try.

The only issue I have with that is Google owning all my data

Are you joking? I will never ever do that.

I haven't had any of the problems you mentioned and I am getting much more spam to my @gmail account than to my paid account.

Just pick a right hosting company and learn how to use spam filters.

This is something I've been thinking of doing.

How well does it deal with lots of email addresses from different domains all going to the same inbox (e.g. support@product1.com, info@product1.com, support@product2.com, info@product2.com, myname@product1.com etc.)?

And one thing that puts me off is the problem described at:

http://daggle.com/060131-134544.html

Have you run into that?

I love it too.  The spam filter is the best I've seen.  It's a no-brainer, for me.

I wouldn't do this for business email, but GMail comes in handy for PAD files.

Actually, I've been loving using Google apps for handling my email.

For some reason, the mail server on my box kept getting broken because for some reason either the process dies or mails get jammed in the queue, or spamassasin stops filtering, or the firewall suddenly starts blocking port 25 (haven't figured that one out yet). Figured I'd just outsource that to google for free.

Basically, all you are doing is forwarding you MX DNS address to them and can create email addresses there. Each address gets 6GB of space. Plus, if you still want, you can set your POP email client to pull copies as well.

I made the move with my business email last week too. I moved my personal domain over a month or two ago when they launched IMAP support.

The combination of excellent spam filtering and universal access to my accounts from any device makes for an awesome email experience. I had some concerns about putting all of my business email on Google's servers, but then realized that no matte what it's on someone else's servers, so it's probably better with them than he alternatives.

To answer some of the questions that have been asked: they have great support for multiple domains through any combination of adding multiple domains to your account, catch-all email addresses, and the ability to run a separate account for each domain. The "Sent on behalf of..." thing isn't an issue with Google Apps for Your Domain as they host the email for your domain natively, not through the general Gmail system. We're not talking about just using Gmail, the info is here: http://google.com/a.

I love it too. 

>> The only issue I have with that is Google owning all my data

Google doesn't "own" your data anymore than my bank "owns" the money I store there.   

I don't get why people are ok with banks handling their money (and data), but not ok with Google...

> I don't get why people are ok with banks handling their money (and data), but not ok with Google...

Banking is regulated (more so in some countries than others).  If a bank starts screwing enough people over (more than usual anyway) then government have an interest to move in.

I guess having the govt as backup makes people feel more safe.  Who regulates Google?

It being free probably increases distrust also.  If you've paid for something, then there are laws and bodies established to protect consumers.

No pay, no contract, no protection.

For those referring to the safety of banking: you did not read the news today, did you?

Or for the last half year, for that matter...

Sorry, to go OT, could not resist.

Google Apps is great, but we had some pretty hard times getting our mail going through SPAM filters in Outlook and Notes.  Be sure to correctly setup your DNS, SPF, etc records correctly.  IMO, Google doesn't go into enough detail about this in their help section.

@MB: you can handle all your domains with alias. This way you can consolidate all the "info" in only one account.

Or you can forward one account to other, etc.

I use google apps everyday for my mail and is great!

But I recomend it to a customer (bad move), and he is facing send limits (100 different address a day) because he forward a lot of email to other people in the same company.

Now he is blaming me!

Moral: never recommend anything to anybody

Google may not own your data, but last I heard they do parse it out for advertising targeting purposes. I wouldn't hesitate to use them for "Hi Mom! Can I come over for dinner on Sunday?" but I'm too paranoid to put my confidential business data in an offsite location.

My brother works for Google and I love my brother, but I just can't bring myself to use their products. Every free application they provide is used internally to optimize their money-making machine. It's not altruism, it's capitalism.

I'm not against Google by any means. They put out some great stuff and my brother and I are both glad they make lots of money. I don't mind if they make money off any data of mine that I don't care about, but I don't have the time to maintain multiple email addresses and such so I keep all of my data internal.

But YOU can keep using there products by all means. :)

We (as many others) use Google as Spam filter:

http://www.iopus.com/guides/gmail-spam-filter.htm

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006035.html

I think that is the best of both worlds.

Google - no way, thank you very much!!!

Hosted email - absolutely - Exchange with 3GB mailbox and Sharepoint for 9.00 USD a month - love it.

Mobile email, Calendar, Full Outlook etc.

http://www.sherweb.com/hosted-exchange

No affiliation, just a happy customer

why not use the webmail you get when you purchase webhosting?

I don't understand the "Google owns your email" thing.  Any email provider "owns" your email.  Does everyone with this argument have a desktop in their home for email?

Yeah but Google is this big and powerful company.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Yeah, I don't get the "Google owns your email" thing either. I've been using Google apps to host email at the "benjismith.net" domain for about a year and a half, and I LOVE it.

I used to manage my own sendmail installation, on a VPS server, and it was an enormous pain in the ass. I felt like Sendmail owned my data, and Sendmail is a fussy bitch.

You guys honestly believe that google hosting the "sensitive" email from your mISV is any more risky than google indexing your mISV website? You think some Google exec would be willing to risk the entire concept of privacy that underlies all Google software, simply to undermine your puny software business?

Your chapeau may need another layer of foil, methinks.

I use Google's domain email server (I guess that's one of the Google apps) for one domain I own that has become a sort of SPAM honeypot. All (non spam) email that it receives gets forwarded to my real email address. The purpose of doing this was to take the SPAM load off of my services, because the one domain will get salvos of several hundred emails per hour at certain times of the day. My VPS can handle the other domains, but the one domain that gets lots of SPAM would cause the email server on my VPS to unload due to the burden.

Google doesn't own my data. I'm basically just using their mail server as a front end processor. And I've used it since it was beta, I think since 2004 or 2005. It's been great and I recommend it.

We use Google Apps exlcusively for our business, and it's worked great. $50 per user/year is cheap as well.

If they want to scan my email I'm OK with that as you get some pretty cool functionality:
* A purchase that didn't have a link to the shipper's tracking site - gmail pulled out the ID and posted a direct link
* An email where someone proposed a meeting "around 8:30" - gmail suggested scheduling a calendar event for the correct time, with the email recipient
* Seamless, one-step option to import Office docs into Google online docs

Scary, but also awesome.