As many of you know that listen to my show you have been hearing me complain about the amount of Spam I have been getting. I have been looking all over the net for a solution and those that I found where either too expensive or they were made for people with small volumes of mail.
As I was talking to Angelo he and I decided to try a Google Service that has been around for a while in beta testing. We both have used Gmail quite a bit and I know it is as good or better than the Spam checker we have been running on our own servers. Up to this point we have been using Qmail with Spamd and several others utilities to filter the mail and scan for viruses.
I decided to take the plunge and applied for a couple of domains tonight and within about 20 minutes I had the mail moved over to Google and was down-loading it into outlook like I always do. I logged into the very familiar Gmail interface and instead of a Gmail.com domain I was not on my very own geeknewscentral.com domain.
So I have been watching the filtering here for a couple of hours, and can tell you so far I am very happy, the true test will come in the morning when I down-load my mail as normal, and then cross check on the Google site to see how much Spam it has caught that I have not had to deal with it. If it works out we are going to see if we can move over a few more domains.
What amazed me was how easy it was to setup, Google has done a really good job here, I am sure that some people would be very worried about having Google host their e-mail and I am not a 100% sure how I feel about it yet. One thing for sure, I feel pretty good that none of it will go missing. [Google.com]
I started using Google Apps for our business, almost two months ago and it’s really worked out great. I could have easily set up multiple accounts, email lists, and catch-all addresses on the domain’s server but, like you said, Google’s spam filters work pretty well.
The tools like shared calendars and XMPP federation for chat make it easier for all of our employees to stay on the same page, as well, since it’s all in one place.
The “domain web pages” is the only service that we aren’t using, since we already have a complete web site, but it’ll be really nice if they integrate Google Docs into the “Apps for your domain” service, down the road.