Email in the cloud

Thursday, August 12th, 2010 at 07:39pm

Yes, I know I should get around to finishing my post about how I am finding Android, but other things are happening that are all interrelated to some degree.

Some time ago I started to setup Google Apps for my domain. Yesterday, after recovering my password, I completed that setup and got to the point where new mail would be delivered to Google. I also have RSS items delivered there as well, but more on that later.

One of the things that made me hesitant about switching to Google Apps was in regard to forwarding/nicknames/aliases. Whenever something asks me for an email address I will create a specific forwarding address. I do not handle this through an email catchall as it is possible to delete a forwarding address if it is no longer needed, or starts to get too much spam.

I currently have 150 forwarding addresses. Not too long ago I had over 200, but I did clean some of them out.

Google calls them nicknames and they appear to have a limit of 30 per account. Now I could create a chain of multiple accounts in Google Apps, each with 30 nicknames that forward on to a single account, but that just seems ugly. I am also considering paying for a Premium account (for greater piece of mine and the ability to turn of ads), but that is US$50 per account per year. Maintaining nicknames in Google is not worth US$250+ per year.

So I needed a way to keep the MX records pointing at my hosting where the 150 forwarders all point to a single mailbox. I then need that single mailbox to forward the messages on to Google. I had seen this done using the test-google-a.com temporary user address.

Two problems with that. First Google says that that address will dissappear from the Google Apps domain after a period of time, and second that had already happened to my domain.

After talking this over with Rob, he suggested that I setup a subdomain on my hosting and add it as a domain alias within Google Apps. The MX records for this subdomain point at google, and the single mailbox on my domain forwards to an address on the subdomain. Since Google knows about the domain it will accept mail for it and the messages end up in my account. It is working fine so far.

I have not attempted to migrate my existing messages yet, I will work out how to structure the labels and what filters I want to setup.

Now filters, that will be the topic of another post.

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