Archive for the ‘Gmail’ Category

Google Apps gets serious

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Google Apps For Your Domain has recently added some new features and, like my boss likes to say, opened its kimono. They are definitely gunning for Microsoft’s Exchange market now (they offer a solution to migrate away from Exchange, can’t be clearer than that.)

But what about us little guys, us geeks with our own domains who aren’t multinational environment shaggers? There are a couple of new features which are very welcome.

Firstly you can keep it free and get 2gb per account on your domain or you can pay $50 per year and get 10gb per account. The $50 option also offers some guarantees, migration tools, an email gateway and integration tools. Not much for us small guys so I think the free version will continue to be fine. You can see a comparison chart here.

The interesting bits are:

  • URL mapping. So instead of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com you can have http://mail.yourdomain.com. Very, very nice that.
  • Google Docs is now available to everyone using Google Apps For Your Domain.
  • Domain alias so you can control two or more domains as one.

I see you can also now register a new domain with Google. I haven’t found out yet if you can transfer existing domains.

So a nice update even for us free loaders and some useful features for bigger users.

Posted in Domain, Gmail, Google, Microsoft, Post, docs, exchange, features, google apps for your domain, update | Comments

Google Reader for Google Apps for Your Domain

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

Something odd just happened with Google. It seems Google Reader is now available for Google Apps for Your Domain though it is not listed.

I’ve been running Google Apps for Your Domain on my paulmwatson.com domain for awhile now. It gave me GMail, Google Calendar etc. Before that I had a normal GMail account which came with a Google Calendar instance as well.

Up until an hour ago though I was using my Google Account (an @gmail.com login) with Google Reader. I then installed the GMail Notifier to see if it could be pointed at my Google run paulmwatson.com GMail account (not the usual @gmail.com account.) This didn’t used to work but now works. It mentioned something about Switching Accounts which I said yes to. Then I went into Google Reader to catch up on some news and had 0 subscriptions. I nearly fell out of my chair but look top right and saw I was logged in with my Google Apps for Your Domain account and not the @gmail.com login.

So it seems Google Reader is unnoficially in the Google Apps for Your Domain list now. Cool.

Posted in AAA, Gmail, Google, Google Reader, notifier | Comments

Spam

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Just a quick one; If I get an email from you of a marketing nature that does not have an unsubscribe link in it then I am going to hit Report Spam in GMail. Even if I have signed up for that email months ago.

Telling me to go back to your site and use login credentials I have long forgotten to uncheck 15 checkboxes to stop receiving emails from you is also not OK.

Posted in AAA, Email, Gmail, Spam, report spam, unsubscribe | Comments

Site browsers

Friday, September 22nd, 2006

The more I come to rely on web-applications the more I think site tailored browsers are a good idea. The idea is best explained with an example; I have GMail open in a Firefox tab for most of the day. It is all too easy to inadvertently close that tab when it is lost amongst 30 others. I also have to swap to the tab every now and then to check if I have email (I can’t use the GMail notifier because I am running hosted Google on my own domain.) Starting a new email means clicking on the tab and hitting compose. I could open it in its own Firefox window but then it is part of the Firefox window list and gets closed when I close Firefox. It doesn’t have a distinct icon in the dock/taskbar either. The list goes on. At the end of it though you realise that what you are frustrated with are all the things having separate desktop apps solve.

But I still want to use the web-app and not a desktop app.

So imagine if you will a customised instance of Firefox that on start loads up my GMail URL, provides a distinct dock icon as well as a “new mail” indicator and right-click “new message” functionality. It runs separatley from my other Firefox instances too.

It need not get too complicated. It shouldn’t end up being a bloated desktop app and it shouldn’t be hard to use it on multiple computers. Really it is just a single-tabbed Firefox instance wrapped around the web-app.

This isn’t my idea though. Matt Brindley is making a living from selling site-specific browsers. He hasn’t done a GMail one yet but I’ll bet there are plenty of people willing to shell out a few bucks for one.

Posted in AAA, Browser, Firefox, Gmail, Idea, Matt Brindley, apps, campfire, desktop, site specific browser, ssb | Comments

Google Voicemail

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

I am not a big voice fan but I must say the new voicemail feature in GTalk is dead handy. Here you can see one that a friend sent to me. It arrives in your gmail inbox as a message with a nice Flash based player.

Posted in Gmail, Google, audio, gtalk, voice, voicemail | Comments

Personal Google Search Trends

Friday, August 18th, 2006

If you have a google account and allow Google to record your searches you can go to google.com/searchhistory/trends to view your own search trends. Interesting stuff though not wholly accurate as my top queries seem a bit wrong and I can’t ever remember searching for Teen Tigers (a porn site it turns out.)

Posted in Gmail, Google, Personal, Screenshot, personal search, search, trends | Comments

Google for Domains

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

Google for Domains

I got invited to Google for Domains yesterday and have switched over to it. It offers you a GMail and Google Calendar instance for your domain. So I own the domain paulmwatson.com and can create multiple email accounts for it e.g. paul@paulmwatson.com. That will then have a login to a GMail interface and a GCal interface. This is just what I have been wanting for as I have had to forward mail to my GMail account which was a bit of a kludge.

The setup was dead easy, simply requiring my domain to have its MX records pointed at Google. You then get an admin account which lets you manage the domain, add email users and even create mailing lists. You can also customise it with your own logo (see the screenshot above.)

Even more brilliant is you get your own GTalk/Jabber system with this. So I can now have my GTalk address as paul@paulmwatson.com. No more paulmwatson@gmail.com

Couple problems though:

  1. There is no easy way to import your years of GMail data into your Google for Domains GMail. You can use GMail Loader but it isn’t perfect (and doesn’t do labels, accounts and other settings.)
  2. Same with Google Calendar, no easy import. Also you can only have on calendar per user at this point, no Work and Personal calendars.

A small but nice feature would be a custom CSS file.

Something else I’d like to see is a link between my paulmwatson@gmail.com Google Account and my domain, even if it just links to paul@paulmwatson.com.

It is a good system though and I will be glad to remove the GMail forwarding headers from my emails.

Posted in GCal, Gmail, Google, Google Calendar, Google for Domains, Hosted | Comments