Letter Never Sent

I got a beta invite for the “Gmail for your domain” program. Basically, the idea is that you let Gmail and Google host your email using one of your domains. So, if you register iamthecoolestguyintheworld.com, you can let Google / Gmail handle all the email and email accounts for that domain. All you have to do is point your MX records to Gmail. They provide a control panel interface for you to create and manage email accounts as well as a total of 2GB of server space. No doubt, they will offer this service paid for with Google ads. It’s a smart service to add as well as a no brainer. Why hasn’t anyone else done this yet?

Most of the web-based email services offered by small web hosts use installations of SquirrelMail, Horde, or NeoMail. If Google can provide a reliable service, I’m sure many people will gladly switch. I imagine many might buy domains just to have personalized Gmail.

Using Gmail for your domain, you get the great Gmail interface, of course. The only downside is that your email is stored with Google rather than on your server. That’s a dubious proposition. I wish you could just license the Gmail software to install on your webserver.

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

1. Search accounts - This search allows you to find accounts by account name. If you create 300 email accounts and you need to find one with a specific name this is how you do it. I imagine this will be useful if Google allows you to host multiple domains in the future.
2. User management – Create new users, change user passwords, etc. You can even force a user to choose a new password on their next login as well as set the user as an admin with admin privileges to manage email for the domain. There are also options to create multiple account aliases for the same user. For example, I could have an email box that collected anything sent to [email protected] or [email protected]. The only other thing I noticed here was the ability to add the user to a mailing list created on the domain.
3. Create mailing list – This is pretty standard. Create a mailing list much like Mailman or other listserv apps, the only difference you can only add users on your domain. That will probably change in the future, which should be troubling to the various listserv companies out there like Lyris and Mailermailer.com.
4. Domain settings – Here you can change the sign-in box color and add a special graphic for your sign-in page, so you can brand your webmail.

The features are limited right now, and match what you can do with any virtual hosting environment. The main benefit here is the Gmail interface as well as the 2GB of essentially free space. That allows you to use your virtual hosting space solely for storing files rather than constantly growing email boxes. I look forward to what they will include in the future. If they coupled this with a domain purchasing program it will be a success. Imagine, a user buys a domain at google.com, signs up for a blog hosted by Blogger, and email hosted by Gmail, all for free. They could even start offering free domain names supported by Adsense.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 5:22 pm and is filed under Software / Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.