The Web Page of Kristopher Linquist

I'm slowly pushing my life up to the cloud.  I've run my own mail server for ... 7 or 8 years.  Shout outs to Alt-N - the makers of MDaemon - their mail server software has performed flawlessly over the years.   I back it up weekly via S3 Backup, but I've never needed to restore.

Recently, my mail server went down.  I don't know why, but when this happens, I have to email the guy I sub-lease colo space from and ask him to reboot it.   The whole process takes 12 hours or so.  During this time, I've got a secondary forwarding server (lower MX record priority) set up here at home (static IPs rock) that sends mail to my gmail account.

I knew that GMail now supported IMAP, so I figured I'd do some googling and see how it all worked if you wanted them to host email for your domain.  You have to sign up for Google Apps, which is free in 'Standard' form.   You get up to 50 email accounts with 7gb each and even get to upload your own "company" logo for sign-in.   Score.

In the past day or two I've been going through the process of moving all of my mail up from my own mail server to  my new Google Apps account.  In the mean time, I have my mail server set to forward my email to the "test email" that GMail provides.  Once I'm finished, then I'll move the MX records over.

I'm a bit annoyed that I can't combine my old GMail account with my new 'Google Apps' email account (actually, I'm more annoyed that I can't combine my calendar, but Spanning Sync will push all of my data back up).   

So far it seems to be working great.   Less data to manage... and my Google Apps email account is still only 20% full.