Google email/domain hosting

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Scott Ehrlich wrote:
> I am curious, from this group, why people trust google to host your
> domain and email.

I posed that same question to a friend who was seeking to host their 
email with Google.

Although I was one of the people posting about this service, I 
personally wouldn't trust Google with my mail archives. But I'm 
interested in evaluating the service for possible future use by clients 
who would find the Google setup to be acceptable (and currently 
outsource their email hosting to third parties).

I plan to test out the Google mail hosting service with a non-essential 
personal domain, and I'll use POP3 to download and locally archive messages.


> From a safety and security standpoint, if you mail hosted on
> your own home machine, you know it is as secure as possible.

That all depends on how skilled you are on maintaining security on your 
home machine, but potentially, yes, if you want your archives to be 
secure, you might be better off hosting them yourself. Don't forget that 
you'll also need to setup off-site backups in order to be on-par with a 
mail hosting service.


> How might hosting your domain and mail on google differ from
> hosting it somewhere else?

What's yet to be seen is what business model Google with use for their 
mail hosting service. If it ends up being advertiser supported, it may 
be the ideal solution for some small businesses.

Cost aside, secondary motivations for using Google as a mail hosting 
provider might be the spam filtering they provide (not all that unique) 
and the web mail UI (more unique, but competition is starting to appear, 
including open source apps.).

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/