Moving to Gmail

Trejkaz — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 10:02:00 +1000

I was experiencing quite a bit of chaos with my email accounts. The two domains I hosted myself were experiencing huge problems with spam which SpamAssassin was no longer able to solve – I would teach it some email and then an identical one would come through the next day. Then I had a couple of other ones hosted on Gmail already, but with different logins, and Gmail has that annoying feature that you can’t log into two different accounts at the same time on the same browser.

Google Apps is free for your own domain, which seemed to be a good idea, so I set it up.

Warning: Disable the Chat service instantly if you already have an XMPP server hosted elsewhere. If you leave it on, then even if you don’t update your DNS records, you will lose the ability to chat with anyone on gmail.com and other hosted domains due to a “server optimisation.” I will move my own server to Gmail only if their server starts supporting offline messages properly, instead of faking it via email.

I picked one of my existing Gmail accounts to be the master and set up every other account to forward-and-delete. Additionally I set the other accounts up with POP and used that to transfer all older emails to the main one so that I can search them.

Gmail’s POP is ridiculously slow though; it takes around half a minute per message for some reason. So it took the better part of a day to wait for all the mails to converge on the one account.

Now I’m at the point where I have to start training the spam filter, and setting up filters and labels to keep everything organised.

There are already a few annoying limitations with Gmail, such as the inability to manually order the labels on the left hand side (obvious hack is to put something like @ at the front of the labels you want to sort to the top.) And I’d really like to be able to declare some labels as special in various ways, e.g. for the unread count to be the total count for some labels.

Anyway the good thing is that this will give me a clear idea of how close Gmail comes to my own needs for a mail client. It might be that I end up bashing something together myself, and finding somewhere to host it (that’s the real issue… if only Google would start doing real hosting.)

Trypticon: Moving to Gmail

Moving to Gmail