Every Flavour Beans

When I got the invitation to test the beta version of Google’s GMail Hosted Domain Service(HDS), I couldn’t make an immediate decision whether I should switch to it or not. Agreed I should have made such a decision before requesting for an invite from Google but initially I was of the thinking that I can manually control where the MX records for my domain point to, so it will be an easy switch between Google and my hosting provider’s service. I checked it out when I actually got the invitation from Google and found to my utter surprise that customers are given direct access only to some of the DNS records and MX records are not one of them. Going through a quick comparision between the services provided by my hosting provider and by Google, I finally decided to go with Google. Here are the reasons why.

There is no doubt that Google Mail provides a fast and easy to use interface which in my opinion is better than any other email interface available today. [Converstation Stacks + Labels + Filters] has become an essential feature set for my day-to-day email management activities and I could now hope to get the same interface for my domain email accounts too. One thing that I was sorely missing from my hosting provider’s email services is the mailing lists: they didn’t support mailing lists at all(which would have overloaded their servers in their opinion). Google’s HDS makes creation of mailing lists easier than creating a google group. This feature infact was what finally prompted me to switch to Google. One drawback of this feature in its current form is that all the members of such a mailing list must have their email accounts at my domain - I can’t add someone with a usual GMail or Yahoo account. This forces me to maintain two different mailing lists - one at my domain for those who have email accounts at my domain and a Google Group for the rest.

When I first learnt about Google’s HDS, I was under the impression that it doesn’t support a ‘Catch-all’ address that will catch all the emails that are sent to non-existent email account ids under my domain name. I guess this was the case when the service was initially launched but now a ‘Catch-all’ email account can be easily created. Some people also reported that HDS is curiously hosted on Google servers and not on GMail servers, hence there may be considerable downtime on these servers when it gets started to be used on a larger scale. Don’t ask me to explain the logic behind this claim, its not mine.

Google Calendar, Google Chat and data storage space independent of the hosting provider were the other reasons why I switched to Google’s service. Below are some screenshots of Google’s HDS:

Login page looks similar to GMail’s login page:

Administration Interface for Google Hosted Domain Email Service

The service cannot be used until you point your MX records to Google’s servers.

MX Records should point to these Google Servers

The Inbox looks the same as that of GMail’s interface.