BeardmoreWeb

When Google enabled IMAP on all accounts I was finally given enough reason to move my primary email over to Google’s App’s service.  I had always wanted to switch to Google App’s for my email except the problem was that I couldn’t sync my email with IMAP and I need this important feature to make everything work.  My setup includes using Mail on OSX and using the built in mail application on Windows Mobile so POP would not have cut it in my situation.  So, as soon as I got word that IMAP was being enabled for Gmail I immediately created a Google App’s account for Beardmoreweb.com.  Migration was very easy, all I did was saved my messages from my old server running IMAP to my local computer and then reset my mail clients to the new Google App’s settings. (This documentation can be found on the GMail help site)  After making the changes to my mail client, I simply had to login to my Google App’s Gmail account and turn on IMAP.  Once this was enabled, everything worked great!

My email sync’s with the server faster than ever before and Gmail’s web interface is light years ahead of Squirrelmail which used to take at least two minutes to load all my emails.

Probably the best feature is that I get almost 5 gig’s of storage per account!  This is a huge increase from what I was dealing with on my old email server.

The hardest part of this was training my family how to use the Gmail web interface.  It took them a little bit of time to understand the conversation oriented layout because they had been used to Squirrelmail, they are still adjusting.

From a management standpoint, Google’s interface is great giving easy access to creation/modification of users and services.  I have no complaints at all, my only wish is that I could have done this long ago!

All in all, the transition took about 3 hours to change my mx records, to dump my email from my old mail server to the new Gmail account, to setup my two mail clients and lastly, to train the rest of my family to use it.  It was a very worthwhile move for me and I highly recommend Google App’s to anyone needing a great IMAP email server with a huge amount of storage all for the price of free!

To switch to Google App’s go to www.google.com/a

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 3:23 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.