I had been procrastinating to set up my company email up until last week when I had to start signing up for services for my company. I thought about managing my own email servers since having total control and privacy is certainly nice. I spent a few hours learning about Postfix but finally decided that it was too much of a hassle to manage my own email server. Plus I want to dedicate all my VPS resources to my web application(more on VPS hosting later) anyway. I also didn’t want to just spend $10 a month to get a shared hosting plan just to get managed emails.
Coincidentally, a Help page of a hosting company mentioned Google Apps for your Domain and it reminded me the free corporate emails Google offers. I spent a few minutes to fill out a form at Google and then made some changes at my domain hoster. 1 1/2 hours later(most of the time was spent waiting), viola, I got my emails working. Privacy is a small concern but I don’t really have any secrets in my company emails for now. When I do, I’ll find something else to switch too. Meanwhile, I’ll be saving at least $10 a month. So far, I’ve created a few users. The UI seems somewhat slower than the consumer Gmail service. However, you can’t beat the price of $0!
Update: I’m now using ThunderBird to get my company emails and so the poor UI performance of Google Apps for your Domain is less of an issue now. Still, I hope Google will fix the frontend performance problems soon.
Update 2: the email is now live at UberSquare.com.
81Electric 