Tom Gidden

As I mentioned in a post on Underscore, last week I got an invite for GMail for your domain. This is a new beta service where Google acts as your domain's MX.

Up until now, all my mail has gone through GoDaddy and been forwarded to GMail. I then use Apple's Mail.app to retrieve the mail via secure POP3. In recent weeks, I've been slightly paranoid that GoDaddy might be dropping mail. Regardless, they're an added point-of-failure. Right at that moment, Google send me the invite.

It was easy to set up. They've made it even easier by detecting that my domain was served by GoDaddy, and giving me GoDaddy-specific instructions on how to set up the MX records (not that it's difficult, but it's a cute feature). The additional SPF record suggestion was cool too, although I don't want to add that until I've fully migrated the DNS.

Now it's time for the criticism. It came off pretty damn well, actually, with the only criticisms being quite minor:

1. My old GMail account can't be imported in, so I have to start fresh. Also, my normal Google login won't be fixed to this new account.
2. It uses a different login page, so I have to remember a new URL. Understandable for replaceable branding reasons, but I'd like to be able to my full address into the normal GMail login box and have it figure it out.
3. There's no facility for adding my secondary domains (eg. gidden.org, litebase.com). Bit of a shame. Means I have to keep the GoDaddy mail forwarding in place for those domains.
4. I can't set up proper forwards. Nicknames are almost forwards, but limited to destination addresses in the same domain. To set up a forward, I have to create a new user account, log into it, and set up normal GMail forwarding with "delete mail" set. With all the logging in and out necessary to set this up, it's a major PITA.
5. The 2GB limit is fixed, rather than the ever-increasing limit of normal GMail.
6. The branding capability is far too limited: you can replace the logo and that's it. No CSS changes or anything. Okay, the complexity of the GMail DOM layout might be a case of "No User-Serviceable Parts Inside", but they could just offer a sample stylesheet for font and colour changes.

I do still wish they'd spruce up the user interface, though. I totally get the sparse look of Google, but I do think Yahoo's new interface is more user-friendly, and Google are practically making a point of being ugly. I wouldn't be happy using this new service for giving accounts to non-computer-savvy clients. I can see a market for small-business setups (in fact, small office London estate agents are just perfect for this market), but without a bit more branding capability, GMail isn't an option IMHO.

Right now, all they've done is wrap something around normal GMail. I'm sure all the hard work was in the MX stuff (although that can't really be too hard!) For a real whole-domain email solution, they should start looking at collaborative functions. Rather than just centralised-management of separate GMail accounts.

Anyway, I've emailed them a bunch of suggestions for this, although I'm sure they've already got a good idea of where they're going with it. (Hey, Google: make your beta feedback function more visible!)

The next obvious step would be for Google to offer name registration and DNS. They've already got their page-building solution (which unfortunately is too limiting to use for proper hosting), blogging (in the form of Blogger) and this new email service.