For some time now I’ve set up my various email addresses to forward to a Gmail account so that I have a very fast searchable archive of emails that is backed up and I also like the convenience of being able to use Outlook when I’m at my desk and webmail when I’m not. The only problem with this setup is that whenever I reply to emails they are sent from my personal Gmail address “on behalf of” my work email address. That just doesn’t look professional so this morning I decided to sign up with Google Apps. Not a big decision really since the free Google Apps account provides everything I need, including 4GB of email storage.

If you’re not familiar with Google Apps, it lets you use Gmail and other Google services such as Calendar, Docs and Chat with a custom domain name. It was incredibly easy to set up. I had to upload an HTML page to my server containing a Google generated identifier so that I could prove to Google that I own the domain. Next, I had to update my DNS settings with MX records pointing to Google’s mail servers. Google then automatically verified that I had set this up correctly. After that there was a delay of around an hour before the new Gmail account was activated.

So I now have a fully managed email service with plenty of storage and arguably the world's best webmail experience and it hasn't cost a penny. Gmail also works very well with my Blackberry phone. Google have very recently added IMAP support to Gmail as well, which now gives me a choice of using Google's spam filtering (which is actually pretty good) or downloading spam emails to my client for filtering there with Cloudmark (the ultimate spam solution in my opinion).

I'm pretty pleased with this setup so far.