Pro Tip: Fix your Google Account after Gmail
No sooner was the ink dry on my rant about how Google screwed me over with separate Google Apps and Google accounts than I found a (partial) fix. No, you still can’t merge the two accounts, but you can remove Gmail from your Google Account, thereby putting it back the way it was before Gmail was provisioned.
I found out about it thanks to this article, which also notes that if you add secondary email addresses to your Google Account, you can also log in with those addresses, plus Google Calendar knows to include invites sent to those addresses in your calendar. Pretty cool.
There is, however, a downside. For whatever reason, my anelson at apocryph Google account still has a separate Contacts database from my anelson at apocryph Google Apps account. This sucks because it means I can’t easily use Google Voice to dial my contacts, or Picasa to tag faces based on my contacts.
Yes, yes, I can export from my Google Apps account and import into my Google account, and I in fact have done so, but it doesn’t stay in sync.
Since my new DROID phone can sync contacts between multiple Google accounts, I thought I’d try adding another email address, anelson.goog at apocryph, to my Google account, give it that email address and my password, and see if it would then retrieve my Google account’s contacts in addition to the Google Apps account contacts which it already retrieves, but I’m afraid the functionality is just too smart, and somehow detected that anelson.goog login was the same as the anelson login and since it already logs in to anelson at apocryph it just modified the existing account settings.
This is a big improvement, but the contact sync issue is a real drag. Hopefully I can figure out a solution one way or another.
Finally moved my whole life's email into Google
In the beginning, I used Eudora Lite to check my POP3 mail accounts. Later came Pegasus Mail. I dabbled with Outlook Express. Some time around 1997 I settled definitively on Outlook, mostly due to it’s (then unique) support for multiple mail accounts each with its own identity, and a powerful filtering system that let me sort messages by the account they came in on.
It was around this time that I started another quirky practice: I never deleted email. Spam, lists, malware; whatever. I filed it in elaborate hierarchies, sure, but I never deleted any email. Ever.
I used Outlook in its various incarnations for years after that. Finally, in the Summer of 2005, I started to have my fill. My mailbox files were well in excess of two gigabytes, at a time when Outlook wasn’t expected to scale even to one. I had thousands upon thousands of emails, and searching them took forever. I also had my mailbox file stored on a network share of a machine that was slowly failing, so I kept getting mailbox corruption. Last, and worst of all, I was being buried in a flurry of spam.
And so it was that I set up a colo hosting account at CI Host, bought a 1U rackmount server, and filled it up with VMWare GSX Server images, including an OpenBSD 3.8 image which I set up to run my email. I had Postfix, IMAP, procmail, and SpamAssassin going. It was great, except for two problems:
- How do get my Outlook mail into my new mail system
and
- Spam filtering still wasn’t very good
At the time, Mozilla Thunderbird had the ability to suck mail out of an Outlook file and into itself, and from there via IMAP I could get it on the server, but I found that in the process any rich text and attachments didn’t make it, making the conversion function worthless.
Believe it or not, I ended up writing my own migration tool in C#, using a shareware MAPI .NET wrapper called MAPI33 and an open-source RFC822 writer library called OpenSmtp.net, combined with alot of my own code, to dump all the mail from my Outlook mailbox files into a Maildir filesystem, which I then rsyncd up to my email server.
Astonishingly, this worked rather well, and most importantly, preserved the rich text and attachment fidelity of my messages.
However, I never did find an adequate solution for spam filtering, despite using SpamAssassin extensively.
I put up with this until around June of 06, after I’d come back from Iraq using only a shitty SquirrelMail web interface to my email and convinced I had to find another solution. As it happened, my request to participate in the Google Apps for Domains beta was approved around that time, so I set up Gmail on my apocryph.org domain. And finally, I was home. Unless you’ve used shitty webmail interfaces like SquirrelMail, you can’t possibly imagine how wonderful Gmail’s interface is. And the spam filtering! NOTHING gets through.
So I happily went along with my email run by Google but on my domain. Then, a week ago, I discovered that sometime in the intervening year, Google had rolled out an option to import your old mail with IMAP. I could finally have ten years of email, all easily accessible and searchable via Gmail’s awesome web interface! So I rsyncd my Maildir up to my Dreamhost account, enabled IMAP on it, pointed Google’s IMAP importer at it, and two days later, 130,000 emails had been imported, catapulting my mail box size from < 500 MB to 2300 MB (good thing Google upped the quota on Apps for Domains accounts to 4GB!).
At last, I have a email system that is exactly what I want. I have an IMAP interface so I can run thick-client mail programs and have offline access to my email, I have a first-class awesome web interface, spam protection is rock-solid, and I can search and sort a huge body of mail without breaking a sweet. It was a long time coming, but it was worth the wait.
Now, please God don’t let Google become evil so I have to move my email somewhere else!
Gmail IMAP wait is over
No longer am I impatiently awaiting IMAP; IMAP support for my apocryph.org domain was turned on just now. I know this because I was checking obsessively throughout the day 
Interestingly, nullpointer.net was a domain I set up with Google Apps somewhat later; apocryph.org has been running Google Apps since the early days of the closed beta.
Gmail for your domain
Earlier this year, Google announced plans to provide Gmail hosting for domains. In other words, to host email services for users’ domains, using the Gmail UI as the mail front-end.
I dutifully signed up for the limited beta test, and forgot all about it. Then, a few days ago I happened to open my gmail account and noticed a message from 19 May saying my request to host email for apocryph.org was approved! I immediately clicked the link to set up the account, and after specifying an admin user and password and approving the ToS I was in.
Immediately I created an anelson user and played around with the services provided. To my delight, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Talk are all included in the hosting package. Sweet!
I quickly found the MX records required to redirect email to Google, and made the changes in the FreeDNS control panel. The [priority]:[hostname] form of the MX records was a bit foreign to me, but I pasted them verbatim into new MX records with FreeDNS and they worked fine.
Within an hour the changes had propagated and I was receiving mail to anelson@ my domain, logged into Gmail! Needless to say I was pleased.
This was cool, but I also wanted Google Talk to work with my new hosting service. I easily located the necessary SRV records, plugged them into FreeDNS (again, verbatim), and signed into Google Talk as anelson@ my domain. Sweet!
All in all, I’m very pleased with the Gmail hosting service. I’ve already requested it for my nullpointer.net domain, so my users on that domain can benefit as well.