Gmail is great, but you have to send and receive from your gmail.com account. In fact, even if you use the POP feature of gmail, your e-mail will always be from yourusername@gmail.com (never yourname@yourdomain.com), regardless of how you set your e-mail address field in your e-mail client. Google actually goes through the trouble to strip your e-mail address out (grumble).
In any case, to more than make up for it, Google has a new service in Beta that I've been on for about half a year now, sometimes called "Google's Domain Mail" (sometimes called "Gmail For Your Domain" and some other names I've seen). In any case, once you setup the nameserver information for your domain, you can now not only send e-mail from yourname@yourdomain.com, but you can manage all the other e-mail addresses for your domain as well. Basically it's a free hosted MS Exchange Server (minus the tight Outlook integration) -- but in any case it's sweet. We've been using at Connexed for a while now.
The only problem I've had is with Blackberry integration. It turns out that an "undocumented feature" of Google's Domain Mail is that it only supports one POP client at a time. Below is longer description of this problem and a workaround for Blackberry users.
Short story: Google's Domain Mail is great. If you can get into the beta then move your domain over, you'll like it.
(details to the Blackberry problem and the workaround)
Problem: Google's Domain Mail provides POP functionality, but only for one client. Once an e-mail client (e.g. Outlook) downloads mail, the mail will NOT be left on the server -- regardless of any settings in the e-mail client or Google's web interface. This means the user's blackberry will not get any e-mail. This is a problem for blackberry users with the following expectations:
1) Users expect that e-mail will be available on their Blackberry, regardless of whether or not their e-mail client has downloaded the e-mail.
2) Users may want to send e-mail from their blackberry via their regular e-mail account (e.g. yourname@yourdomain.com instead of yourname@yourcellularcarrier.blackberry.net). This is esp. important if you want any replies to e-mail sent from your blackberry to show up in your e-mail client on your computer.
Solution:
1) Create an e-mail account just for your blackberry, e.g. yourname@yourcellcarrirer.blackberry.net. (Added benefit: this account will immediately push any e-mail that it gets directly to your blackberry, which is much faster than the 15 min (3 min when e-mail is present on the last check) interval between POP's that blackberry usually uses.)
2) In Google's Domain Mail select, Settings, Forwarding and POP, then "Forward a copy of incoming mail to", enter your blackberry's e-mail address in the box (e.g. yourname@yourcellcarrirer.blackberry.net) and then select "keep yourdomain's copy in the inbox". E-mail sent to yourdomain will now be available to both your POP client and your Blackberry.
3) When replying to an e-mail on your blackberry, do not use the reply function in the blackberry. Instead scroll down to "send e-mail", scroll up to the "send using field", select "change option", and select the yourname@yourdomain.com e-mail address to send (you can set this address up on your Blackberry Internet Service page, if it isn't arleady).
4) To keep from getting duplicate copies of all your e-mail on your blackberry, use the filter functionality in your Blackberry Internet Service page to filter all e-mail for which there is no rule -- now you can still send from yourname@yourdomain.com, but you won't get duplicate e-mail there either.
Hope that help some other poor unfortunate soul out there.
Posted by rick at September 13, 2006 11:25 PM