I have to admit to also moving most of the world-wide base of operations of my vast multi-national holdings to Google Apps. Its just easier. There are the usual flock of plugins, the firefox hacks, Greasemonkey addins. Then there is the access. With the IMAP that Lifehacker and others have reported; its just too darned easy to build your very own universal email home using Gmail. Here is what I did to make it happen:
Buy the premiere Google Apps support. You get to add domain names, domain aliases, switch on multiple accounts to send from, have support for POP if you need it. Add in a few accounts that you have strewn all around the netaverse. Now you have a single home and you can administer it from one place. For some reason this creates a very empowering situation for users that always thought they would have to use Thunderbird, Firefox, a bunch of Unix shells.
Use the wondrous spam fighting to truly rid yourself. Here is what i do. My primary domain for most things is this one. I have shell. I can write procmail recipes. I can redirect and forward. So I just wrote a very simple procmail recipe to send all mail to gmail after creating a backup copy. Very easy to do. Dig what it looks like in procmail-ese:
———–snippage of .procmailrc file———————–
:0 :
* !^(To|Cc|Bcc|From|Sender):.*mperry@lnxpowered.org
filtered
:0
{
:0 c
! xxxx@yyyy.com
:0 :
saved
}
:0 :
$DEFAULT
———————-end of the snippage——————
So what does it do exactly? Well. It tells my ISP’s mail server to never mind about email that is not directed to, CC, BCC, etc to me. This gets rid of a whole bunch of spam and you can do this in Thunderbird easily too. Then I tell my account to forward and copy all email so a copy goes to my google apps domain and gets backed up. The backup happens with the strange colon and 0 (not the letter O). Procmail is wonderful but strange and it talks a special language of dots and letters and recipes. Worth learning.
Finally, you can verify additional email addresses in Gmail and take all the forwards and create new From: addresses for them. Voila! One mail box to rule them all.
Now on to the relevance of Yahoo! Mail. I don’t think there is any any more. Its spam filters suck. Don’t even get me started on that pitiful excuse for a calendar. A calendar is meant to be shared Yahooligans. How about creating a calendaring system that’s actually useful.
I still like the home page; but on my work system and my systems not used at home too much; its changed to igoogle.
There are challenges that Google faces. One is how to integrate the various and sundry applications and truly provide software as a service where people can take each thing and fit them all together. I’d like to have taken my gmail account and just dedicated it to the google for domains thing.
But that will probably come later. I figure by the time that Yahoo! figures out that people actually want to do something unique with the calendar and email application, Google will have crossed the rubicon with free and paid gmail services and offer each of us the ability to blend the offerings.
Meanwhile; Gmail and Google Apps is the pie filling that fills up this crusty old soul.
