I took the plunge, may the cloud be with me

I finally decided to move my mail to Google.

The domain with my primary e-mail address has been using Dreamhost’s POP service for a few years now, and while I can’t really complain too much about availability / downtime, POP just hasn’t been cutting it for me for quite a while.

Occasionally, Outlook farts and redownloads my mail, causing me to have duplicate mails. Sometimes repeatedly in rapid succession. Sometimes I’ve cleaned it up, others not. This behavior led me to keep a minimal number of messages on the server. Not none, but I think I had outlook set to only keep a day or two’s worth. This made the horrible Squirrelmail UI even less useful, since webmail only had a few days of stuff to play with, and even that still contained quite a bit of spam.

Dreamhost will run mail through an anti-spam filter and quarantine it, sending a junk mail report on occasion — but to reclaim false positives, it’s a pain in the rear through a crappy web interface with a lot of checkboxes. If any Dreamhost employees happen upon this — get yourselves a Web 2.0 drag and drop UI with autosave. Nothing like diligently checking boxes then accidently navigating away from the page or something and losing everything…

Add to that recent issues I’ve had with connectivity back into my main desktop, with my wonderful PSTs… I’ve even named one of them mylife.pst — I’ve learned over the years that the most vital thing to get onto a new build as I upgrade is my PSTs. When a hard drive starts to go bad, it’s the PSTs I make sure I have backups of. But I digress… since my mail has lived primarily on a single Windows PC, when I want to get to the mail that “fell off” my iPhone and I’m not at my home office desk, RDP is the only real option. When that’s not possible for any of a host of reasons, my data’s dead to me.

I finally took the plunge and signed up for Google Apps Standard and used the Google Email Uploader to set my beloved email on angels’ wings and watched it flutter into the cloud.

It took a while to get everything set up — Dreamhost made it easy to switch to using Google Apps, having the right template in place to make the DNS changes in one easy step. I made the switch and scrambled to get myself to normal before the hour got too late (which it did a few nights this week, partly due to this switch), concerned with figuring out which e-mail addresses I’d had on the domain. Dreamhost made it so easy to switch to Google, I did it before copying and pasting the old config somewhere for safekeeping. With it being non-obvious how to set up forwarding-only addresses, I started to create an account for each address I’d used. Realizing that Google Apps lets you add a catch-all, I knew I had my insurance, and again went looking for how to have aliases.

I’m happy to say that I found them. Logged into the Google Apps control panel as an administrator, Manage This Domain -> Users and Groups [Users tab] -> click on the user account for which you’re adding the aliases. The feature is called Nicknames. You have to add them one at a time, but it’s just what I was looking for.

Everything’s finally uploaded. I added Google Sync, to add ActiveSync compatibility (it’s in the control panel under Service Settings-> Mobile) and configured my iPhone to use it for push mail, calendar sync, and contact sync. I’m still debating just using the webmail interface (with offline enabled) or Outlook as my primary access method to my mail on my main desktop — I thought I’d quit Outlook and re-examine if I see withdrawal symptoms.

Totally off-topic: My main PC is named Shaq – it’s big, black and powerful – full tower case, water cooling, 4 cores @ 3.2GHz, 8GB of RAM, about 8TB of storage. When I was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon, there was a guy across the hall named Martin with a NextCube he’d named clewis, short for Carl Lewis, since it was small, black, and fast. It’s funny how I’ve carried that with me and used it 16 years later. Props Martin!