January 4, 2008

Early thoughts on outsourcing to Google Mail

Google doesn’t just offer free email of the form address@gmail.com. You can also outsource your own domain to them (free if you accept incoming ads, $50/year/mailbox if you don’t). I’ve chosen to do this, because:

  1. I need a mail host that can stand up under the kind of mailbomb/DDOS attacks that shut me down twice in the past year.
  2. Similarly, I want to diversify my email addresses among two providers, rather than leaving them all with my general web hosting company.
  3. David Ferris first wrote up Google Mail outsourcing, with a favorable view, last July. And some of his criticisms (e.g., lack of IMAP support) have already been rectified.
  4. What’s more — as I remarked last night, David and his associate Richi Jennings have been voting with their feet, and moving their own email to Google. That’s an impressive endorsement. Ferris Research is a serious rival to Gartner as an analyst firm covering email, and Richi — who evidently LOVES Gmail — has also carved out a non-trivial identity as an expert in his own right.
  5. Free sounds good, compared with the alternatives.

Now that I’ve gone ahead with the move to Google Mail, here are some scattered thoughts:

That’s about it for now. In particular, I haven’t done anything yet with Google Mail’s search capabilities. More on that down the road, perhaps.

Comments

12 Responses to “Early thoughts on outsourcing to Google Mail”

  1. Steve Hochschild on January 8th, 2008 11:00 am

    You may still have problems: The Software Memories link drops me to the files system, and this morning’s feedblitz gave an error message. Good Luck!

    steveh

    Here are the latest updates for shochschild@pervasive.com
    “Monash Information Services” – 1 new article
    1. Error reading source feed.
    2. More Recent Articles
    Error reading source feed.
    Error reading source feed http://www.softwarememories.com/wp-atom.php: The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error.
    • Email to a friend • Related •

  2. Curt Monash on January 9th, 2008 4:35 am

    Thanks, Steve. You’re only the second person who bothered to point that out, so I really appreciate the trouble you took to do so.

    But in the event, that was a wholly separate problem. I had problems setting up the domain for http://www.strategicmessaging.com, and in the back-and-forth softwarememories.com got zapped. It’s back now.

    Coming so soon after the other problem, I hated it, as I’m sure you and my other readers did too. 🙁

    CAM

  3. Looking On on February 5th, 2008 1:45 am

    Curt,

    I’m surprised (although mildly) that you think so highly of Ferris research. Although I prefer in this instance to remain anonymous (ostensibly, to protect my employer) I can perhaps ask that you look into the conflicts of interest that Ferris’ analysts covering messaging and archiving will exhibit under public scrutiny. Although Ferris makes no play to hide it particularly, those two analysts work for archiving vendors. A top-tier analyst should strive to be impartial in all regards, and a number of industry voices are murmuring that Ferris is definitely not around archiving. Of course, Ferris has stimulated a lot of debate about various markets within the industry that we all think is highly valuable, and at least the analyst you mention appears to be independent – and I’m not about to mock his operation from an anonymous high! Those aspects are valuable. However, I don’t think that Ferris is about to rival Gartner any time soon.

    Keep up the good work.

  4. David Ferris on February 5th, 2008 1:40 pm

    We try very hard to avoid biases. I’d be happy to address any specific concerns the prior poster has. It would also be helpful to know who the poster is, to understand their background.

  5. The Monash Report»Blog Archive » We’re having a bit of a rocky server transition on February 6th, 2008 8:56 pm

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  7. Joe Harris on July 1st, 2008 9:15 am

    Curt,

    I really balked at not being able to sort in Gmail at first. I think the paradigm is very much archive everything and then search.

    Once I learned the “special” Gmail search syntax I found it to be better than sorting and probably quicker to boot.

    Joe

  8. Google Wave — finally a Microsoft killer? | Text Technologies on May 29th, 2009 5:49 am

    […] its cloud-based offerings to make a huge dent in Microsoft’s market. But even with its flaws Google has already been a good alternative for a […]

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