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:
- 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.)
- 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.
