My reasons for moving to Google Apps were:

• Sometimes they can be a bit creepy but I trust them as much as I trust any other ISP or mail provider.
• I want to provide email to family members.
• My current setup has my mail provided by Bluehost as part of my hosting service. This pretty much puts me in charge of the email server. I just don’t want to have to worry about backups and email problems. It was OK when I was the only one using it, but if I’m going to bring other’s on board it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.
• EMail is not tied to an ISP.
• GMail has the best spam filter I’ve ever used.

Google Apps includes Mail (including Talk & Calendar), Docs & Spreadsheets, Personal Start Page and Page Creator. There are two versions, free and Premium. Free allows 2GB for email and is ad supported. Premium allows 10GB for email and allows the ads to be turned off. Premium also has a 99.9% email uptime guarantee, along with mail migration tools and integration tools a business may look for. My only interest in Google Apps is for email.

I started with the free edition but quickly signed up for the 30 day Premium trial so that I can use the IMAP mail migration tools that’s included.

Domain Structure

The domain I use for email is my primary domain with my Bluehost account but there’s no website associated with it. While I *should* be able to use the same domain as the primary domain with Google Apps I decide to be cautious since I’ve never done this before. I registered a new domain with 1&1 and use it as the primary domain with Google Apps. The domains I’ll use are (not the real names):

myfamilyblue.com - this is primary domain with Bluehost and the domain I use with email. I want to use this domain for email addresses.

myfamilyga.com - this is a new domain I’ll register and use as the primary domain for Google Apps. This will be available for email addresses and deliver to the same mailboxes as the other domain, but I won’t hand out the domain name.

In addition, while I can change MX records myself with Bluehost I have to go through tech support to change CName records. With 1&1 I can change both MX and CName records. This means I can make changes myself without having to go through tech support. This will be less annoying to me and less annoying for them if I decide to undo changes.

For the subdomains I’ll want mail.myfamilyga.com to access mail but I’ll use the default URLs for the other tools. You don’t need to use subdomains since Google Apps will give you URLs but I wanted the sub-domain for easy access to the frequently used mail. I can setup redirection for the subdomains of myfamilyblue.com to redirect to the Google App URLs.

There are additional restrictions if you buy the domain from Google, such as not being able to cancel Google Apps for a year. I’ll use my own domain that’s already registered.

Setting Up the Domain

1. I registered the new domain, myfamilyga.com, at 1&1(aff) and waited for the DNS to replicate.
2. Then I registered with Google Apps for Domains. I set up the first user during registration and this will is the admin ID.
3. Google does create a test address so you can test email before changing your MX records. The address is displayed when you first set up Google Apps.
4. I need to verify the domain with Google before the services will actually start working. Google provides a couple of ways to do this. Either copy a specific html file to the site or create a CName record. I went the CName record route since I wanted one anyway. Google provides instructions for various domain hosts and I used the ones they provided for 1&1. In the case of 1&1 I needed to create a sub-domain then go in and create a CName record for that sub-domain and point it to ghs.google.com. I didn’t have to wait for this to replicate before I could continue, although it does need to replicate before email can be fully used.

   Note: It’s a bit hidden in the help but Google also allows a MX record to verify domain registration. So if your mail system is ready to go you can just create the MX record. Remember, mail deliver will go to Google once the MX record is created so make sure all users are created if they have mailboxes on another server. My domain verification seemed slow so I created an MX record and then verification completed immediately. It may have been a coincidence.

5. The next step is to set up the users which will also create the mailboxes. I already created a user name for myself while setting up Google Apps. So I set up nicknames for all the other mailboxes and forwarding addresses that I had set up on the old myfamilyblue.com.
6. The next step is to change the MX records for the domain. As soon as the MX records are changed all the email will start going to GMail so you’ll want all the users set up before making the change. In my case I have a new domain so I changed the MX records immediately so they have time to replicate. The MX record information provided by Google is here. The setup may vary depending on your domain host. Just make sure the entries are in the order listed by Google and that the priorities go from higher to lower. My setup for 1and1 MX records is shown below (click for full screen).
   
7. Since I wanted multiple domains reporting into Google Apps I went into the “Domain Settings” section, “Domain Names” tab and added the myfamilyblue.com domain as an alias. Then I went to Bluehost and changed the MX records. Here’s how to set up the MX records at Bluehost(aff).
   
8. Test mail delivery to the users that have been set up. It may take time for the MX records to take effect.

You can use this NSLOOKUP(kloth.net) tool to see if the CName and MX records have changed on your DNS server. Enter your domain in the domain field and enter the DNS server (from your hosting/DNS provider) in the server field, then select the record type from the dropdown list. If you registered a new domain in step 1 it may take time for the change to replicate through the internet. For the first 48 hours the query may show your DNS server has the correct information but the rest of the internet may not know that your domain info is on that server.

IMAP Mail Import

I registered for the free-trial of the premium version so I could use the IMAP migration tool. My Bluehost email was in IMAP mailboxes and was the bulk of my EMail.

The IMAP email migration tool is under the “Advanced Tools” tab (premium edition only). I set up the server connection to Bluehost. For server software I picked “Cyrus” (first choice for trial and error) no security and port 143. Some mail systems may require an “IMAP Path” such as “Inbox”. I told the wizard I’d specify a few accounts and then I entered the user id and logon information for the accounts to migrate. I was pulling everything into my one new GMail mailbox.

The migration took some time, about 45 minutes in my case, and is dependent on quantity and size. A progress bar displays the status or you can click into the details and see how many emails have been migrated. As the mail was pulled in the migration tool added two tags, one was the email address of the old mailbox and the other was the full folder path that the email was in. The tagging was an unexpected and nice bonus.

My AOL My eAddress mailboxes are also IMAP mailboxes. I tried the migration tool on them but always received errors soon after the migration began. I only had about 100 emails in those mailboxes and only a couple of folders. So after a few migration failures I went to plan B. The My eAddress mailboxes were already set up in Thunderbird so I created a new IMAP mailbox on Bluehost, added it to Thunderbird and dragged the AOL email to the new account. Then I used the IMAP import utility to pull it into GMail.

Summary

At this point I had GMail working in my own domain. I really don’t have an interest in the other Google App pieces.

Some things to keep in mind:

• I have two domains. When I set up a user ID it gets one mailbox that is addressable with both domains. So ray -at- myfamilyblue.com and ray -at- myfamilyga.com deliver mail to the same user mailbox.
• Nicknames can be set up for users. I consolidated all my myfamilyblue.com mailboxes and forwarding addresses into one GMail mailbox by setting up a nickname for each one.

In part 2 I’ll cover importing mail from POP accounts (such as my other GMail accounts) and consolidating all my email in this one mailbox. All things which are available with regular GMail accounts.

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For starters on GMail and Picassa can share the storage but the blog posting says:

soon, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets

Could this be the precursor to Google Drive where Google officially allows us to throw any files up there?

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The change was implemented without warning (at least none that I saw) which seems rather bold. While the changes are simple and easy to understand it’s a pretty significant UI change which always seems to cause problems when users encounter them without warning. Existing tags were converted to folders with the documents (that had the tag) in them. Documents that had multiple tags get put in multiple folders although all are actually the same document.

Starred documents are still marked with stars and there’s a folder for them. There’s also folders to hold documents by type, for documents you created, for trash and for documents you shared. OK, technically Google doesn’t call these folders and they aren’t included in “All Folders” but they’re in the folder pane.

Naturally there’s a search box up top so you can search your files.

The UI is pretty cool for a web interface. It was responsive to me like most Google stuff is. But it supported “Web 2.0″ features like being able to drag a file into a folder. Dragging from one folder to another moves the doc, dragging from “All Documents” adds it to the folder.

One feature I really like in Google Docs is the ability to print to a PDF. This isn’t a new feature but I find it easier to use in the new interface since it can easily be done from the main page without having to open the document and print to pdf.

For what little I need a word processor or spreadsheet for I find Google Docs and Spreadsheets to be a good fit and the price is right. And being browser based it’s cross platform.

Firefox on my iMac also received an update of the Google Toolbar today. Based on the version number it was released May 25, 2007. I didn’t find the version listed in Google’s version history so I’m not sure what’s in it. I’m not a heavy user of the toolbar but I like the spellcheck (needed less with Firefox 2) and the ability to jump to one of the words in my search. Still, I only use it a couple times a week at most, usually sticking to the search box built into Firefox which is set to SearchMash (which is also by Google).

This is the page I got to tell me about the update (click picture for full size):

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• easily repeat a search on the Internet after doing a desktop search
• include a GMail account in the index (but only one mailbox)
• search and recover deleted documents
• browser history in the index
• some other reason that will only be apparent after using it

Any e-mail client with a spotlight plugin can also be included in the search so Apple Mail.app will be included. Due to my recent Apple Mail woes I was hoping for the ability to search Thunderbird mail but it doesn’t appear I’ll get that. Google Desktop can also index your iDisk. The option to include my iPod in the index is enabled so I assume it can be included although it’s not something I’m going to try and it was off by default even though the iPod was mounted as a disk.

I’ve never been a user of desktop search tools on Windows but I’ve become a bit of a spotlight fan so I decided to give Google Desktop a try and installed it tonight which I cover down below. About 100K items were indexed on my Mac in bout 45 minutes while I was using the Mac. I haven’t restarted my browser yet so the history isn’t included. There wasn’t any noticeable impact on performance and by the time I got around to checking activity monitor it was already done. I indexed a fairly new and very small GMail mailbox and it was done quickly. I had seen references to GMail being indexed relatively slowly because it did it in small chuncks, with delays in between, in order to keep network usage down but I couldn’t confirm that. Google Desktop in a Universal App so it runs natively on both Intel and PPC Macs.

The things that immediately jumped to my wishlist were:

• support for more than one Gmail account
• include Thunderbird in the index
• group search results like Spotlight does

But on the last point when I select “Show all results…” the search results are sent to my browser and I have options to see only e-mail, web history, files, media and others. Like spotlight the search occurs as you type which is a feature of spotlight it took me awhile to get used to. Having lots of results pop up with the first letters and the resulting screen flicker as the results are reduced was annoying until I got used to it.

Another question I’ll have to look into is what the option to search deleted files does to disk space.

The search window is displayed by pressing the command key twice in a row which is configurable. The search window os shown to the right.

Installation

Google Desktop for the Mac is installed through the “Google Updater” which is actually what’s downloaded deom the link. The download is a disk image file (.DMG) and when mounted there’s a single icon called “Double click to Install Google Desktop”. I do as it says.

After providing the admin password to allow the install there’s a prompt to enable usage statistics.

I disable the statistics and then I’m prompted again for my administrator password. It then begins a 2.8MB download of Google Desktop. Once the install finishes I get the option to install other Google software along with the message that the install is done and I should restart my browsers.

I click the button to open Google desktop and it opens in my browser (Firefox).

The installation kept the exclusions I had set up in my spotlight privacy settings and is not indexing the drives and directories that I had excluded from Spotlight.

Configuration

The Google Desktop preferences are added to the System Preferences (in the Other section) which is a nice touch. These are the default settings and available options.

The Feedback panel simply has options to enable/disable usage statistics and to open Google Updater to update or uninstall Google Desktop.

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