By Michael Marr
Expert Author
Article Date: 2010-07-16
Google Apps offers a free version of their Gmail service, which they call their Standard Edition. What makes this "App" different from the free email service you can obtain at www.gmail.com is the ability to host your own domain's email on Google, i.e. yourname@yourdomain.com. For small businesses and organization, you can take advantage of the reliability, spam filtering, and webmail client of Google for free!
Being free, this service does have its limitations. You can only host fifty (50) mailboxes per domain, and each mailbox is limited to 7 GB of space. For those that need more mailboxes and space, Google offers editions for businesses, governments, non-profits, and schools. These editions pack a bigger punch, but do require you open up your wallet. If the free version of this service doesn't suit your needs, considering these other editions for use is still a valuable use of your time.After signing up for your Google Apps account, you can begin the process of hosting your domain's e-mail with Google. First, Google will verify that own the domain. After you have completed that process, you will need to update your MX records to point to Google's mailservers. The propagation of this DNS change may take some time. During this time, you will receive some e-mail on your old server, and some with Google. Once your DNS modifications have fully propagated, all your new incoming e-mail should arrive on your Google hosted mailboxes.
Google offers an Email Migration API for the standard edition. You can use this API to write a script to properly handle the migration of all the email from your old mailboxes into the new mailboxes. However, Google supplies theses scripts for various mail servers and protocols when you are using editions other than the free standard edition. (Google is currently offering a free 30 day trail of the Professional Edition, which has these migration scripts available.)
If you are currently have reliability, spam, webmail, or other e-mail related problems, the Standard Edition of Google Apps Gmail may be the right (and free) fit for your organization.
