Changes are afoot

I came across a link to Google Apps the other day and it certainly intrigued me. Why ? Well, I have been running Lotus Domino as my personal mail server for some time now, primarily on the basis that I have many years experience with Domino, and it offers both a decent mail client (OK, Notes has it’s idiosyncrasies, but I am very familiar with it and can make it work the way I want) and the ability for me to check my mail online using Domino Web Access (DWA). This all happens in a VMWare-based virtual linux server (specifically Fedora Core 4) running Domino 7 and using fetchmail to pull four family members’ personal mail into separate mail databases. It works, and works well, but it has a downside. Basically, no matter where I am, if I want to access my personal or work emails then this virtual server has to be up and running. And since this does not sit in a server farm somewhere, I can’t guarantee it will be available.

So when I saw Google Apps I thought that there may be an opportunity to replicate the important aspects of my current setup within a more stable environment with higher availability. Here’s how I see it working:

• Register the ‘family’ domain name with Google Apps, giving mail, calendar, chat and website for free.
• Change my MX and various CNAME records for the domain to point to Google.
• Install Thunderbird as the new mail client, pulling emails from Google using POP3.

And that’s about it. The big issue right now is how to migrate everything from Notes to Thunderbird, but I will probably use IMAP to give access to old emails for a month or two and not bother copying everything across. Sometimes these exercises are a good means of having a tidy up !

I’m not totally convinced that POP3 is the way to go, but Google mail does have a setting that archives emails once they have been downloaded, and I think that will be the best solution. I will blog more about this, but initially I think it’s a good solution. I am certainly looking forward to the point in time when the Fedora VM is only fired up occasionally rather than running all the time. It’s a bit of a resource hog on what is, after all, a family PC.

1. What’s IT all about? Google Apps update « says:

   April 30, 2007 at 1:41 pm

   [...] blogged a few days ago about my initial impressions of Google Apps, saying that it looked promising as a [...]