October 2007 Archives
A couple of months into our small deployment of Google Apps and I figure it's about time for an update with my experience on how it's been going.
So far, we've transferred 3 "large" accounts over to Google Apps for email hosting (none really use the other features to my knowledge). The first account was my company's which only has 3 real addresses on it but it's high volume and it's important to me so I'm calling it "large". The second account was a domain entirely made up of forwarders to remote email accounts (about 40 in all). The third was a real estate company which is made up of about 25 POP accounts and 25 forwarders.
Before I get into that though, I guess a little background information is in order. Basically, spam lists don't seem to like us very much. On each real estate site we have, site users have the ability to register and be notified automatically when new properties come on the market that match their search criteria. Many users have pretty broad search parameters so we often times have a lot of emails going out each morning. All of these are opt-in with clear directions to turn off the emails. Seems simple and harmless enough but blacklists have had fun with us I think. The emails themselves don't normally end up being reported (I can't recall any time I've gotten a report from a spamlist and it's been related to these emails) but I believe they end up playing an important role in our problem. Read on.
So account 1 was changed. It involved making setting changes for 3 accounts on 2 different computers within Outlook. The setting changes and MX entry changes were done at the same time on the computers to keep everything consistent so we didn't lose any emails in the process. Pretty easy and slick.
Account 2 was a little more work but it was still pretty easy. Created the Google Apps account for them, setup all of the forwarders within the admin dashboard and we were ready to go. The MX record change didn't cause any problems because either emails were being forwarded by us or by Google. Either way, the end result is that the email is in the same place. We let one of the main people know what we were doing just so they knew (we emailed them after the change actually) but the change was easy.
Account 3 was a completely different story. The 25 email forwarders weren't much of a problem (just like Account 2) but getting 25 pretty computer illiterate people to change their Outlook settings was an event like none other. We made multiple meetings with the company about the change to ensure that they were comfortable with what we were going to be doing. About 12 hours before the planned changeover, I setup forwarders on our system to go to the temporary email addresses Google provides so emails could start going there (and so screens weren't blank when they changed their settings). On the day of the planned change, I spent almost the entire day in their office walking around to the different computers behind each user so they could log into their Windows network profile, launch the email program they use (was either Outlook Express or Outlook XP) and instruct them through the process of making the setting changes while I'm standing over their shoulder.
Long story short, that was about 3 weeks ago and the full MX record change didn't happen until a few days ago. There were a few users who weren't there that day and we've had to wait until there was a good time to walk them through the process.
So far....
The Good
The Bad
Quick, final note about the spam filtering. I'm still trying to learn how it works, how strict it is, etc. While we had the 3rd account (mentioned above) still forwarding using the temporary addresses, we popped onto a spamlist for a few hours which caused all email leaving our server to Gmail's servers to be marked as spam. It's good that they went through to their system and weren't totally rejected, but the spam folder isn't normally available via 3rd party POP3 clients so it's almost as bad as them being deleted and gone forever.
All 3 accounts mentioned above are fully pointed to Gmail now via their MX records. If it wasn't such a painful process of have their domain's DNS zones hosted elsewhere, I'd probably do that also but things seem to be going well so far. Now that most of our off-site email forwarders are off our system, I'm hoping we're done with these spamlists for a while. DNSstuff.com and I are becoming pretty good friends unfortunately.
Small side thought: I'm not convinced yet that it actually wasn't Google that got us listed with the spamlists this last time, but that's the name of the game with forwarders I guess. I'm hoping that they'll start seeing our daily email notifications as more relevant emails and not consider that excessive volume which would look like spam. Fingers crossed. I feel like I'm back in high school trying to please everybody so everyone will like me.
So far, we've transferred 3 "large" accounts over to Google Apps for email hosting (none really use the other features to my knowledge). The first account was my company's which only has 3 real addresses on it but it's high volume and it's important to me so I'm calling it "large". The second account was a domain entirely made up of forwarders to remote email accounts (about 40 in all). The third was a real estate company which is made up of about 25 POP accounts and 25 forwarders.
Before I get into that though, I guess a little background information is in order. Basically, spam lists don't seem to like us very much. On each real estate site we have, site users have the ability to register and be notified automatically when new properties come on the market that match their search criteria. Many users have pretty broad search parameters so we often times have a lot of emails going out each morning. All of these are opt-in with clear directions to turn off the emails. Seems simple and harmless enough but blacklists have had fun with us I think. The emails themselves don't normally end up being reported (I can't recall any time I've gotten a report from a spamlist and it's been related to these emails) but I believe they end up playing an important role in our problem. Read on.
So account 1 was changed. It involved making setting changes for 3 accounts on 2 different computers within Outlook. The setting changes and MX entry changes were done at the same time on the computers to keep everything consistent so we didn't lose any emails in the process. Pretty easy and slick.
Account 2 was a little more work but it was still pretty easy. Created the Google Apps account for them, setup all of the forwarders within the admin dashboard and we were ready to go. The MX record change didn't cause any problems because either emails were being forwarded by us or by Google. Either way, the end result is that the email is in the same place. We let one of the main people know what we were doing just so they knew (we emailed them after the change actually) but the change was easy.
Account 3 was a completely different story. The 25 email forwarders weren't much of a problem (just like Account 2) but getting 25 pretty computer illiterate people to change their Outlook settings was an event like none other. We made multiple meetings with the company about the change to ensure that they were comfortable with what we were going to be doing. About 12 hours before the planned changeover, I setup forwarders on our system to go to the temporary email addresses Google provides so emails could start going there (and so screens weren't blank when they changed their settings). On the day of the planned change, I spent almost the entire day in their office walking around to the different computers behind each user so they could log into their Windows network profile, launch the email program they use (was either Outlook Express or Outlook XP) and instruct them through the process of making the setting changes while I'm standing over their shoulder.
Long story short, that was about 3 weeks ago and the full MX record change didn't happen until a few days ago. There were a few users who weren't there that day and we've had to wait until there was a good time to walk them through the process.
So far....
The Good
- Solid solution. No downtime or access-related problems so far that I've noticed. Helps me sleep better
- Good spam filtering (more on this below). Filters both accounts and emails being forwarded on (we could too but we had to create a POP3 account for the forwarder to get our spam killing solution to zap the emails before sending them onto the remote destination and the local POP3 account would max it's quota and emails would start failing)
- Easy to use admin dashboard
- Integrated webmail and POP access. Very nice to have emails sent via Outlook appear in webmail also. The other webmail solutions were totally disconnected from POP clients
- Lots of space and growing. Up to almost 4,500MB at the time of writing this (and that's for the free account)
The Bad
- Minor "feature" is causing a lot of headaches. When you send yourself an email, it will appear as a new email within the webmail interface but it won't be downloaded via POP3. I think I understand the reason for doing this BUT when someone sends an email to themselves and it doesn't come back to them, it looks like there's a problem. If they could get rid of this feature and start allowing those emails to be available via POP3 access, that would make my life a lot easier. There is no good solution I've found to put a workaround in place for this that doesn't involve making changes to each individual user's settings.
- They're in control now instead of me. I've gotten a few questions about email delivery recently that I'd normally have no problem getting information about because I have access to all of our server logs but I'm a little in the dark when it comes to Gmail's system. Although this may seem like a big deal, it's not that bad because their solution is solid and it doesn't seem to suffer from weird glitches. I've eventually tracked down the issue of delivery with each of those reported problems and they've never been because of Gmail's system. I just wish I could punch in a few commands and find out what was going on myself, but I've found myself trusting their system to do what it's supposed to so I've focused my troubleshooting steps on everything else
- Advanced filtering and whitelist features are only available for the Google Apps paid accounts. Any person in a user's contact list will be automatically whitelisted (which is a good feature, by the way) but the advanced features within the paid service allow domain-wide settings instead of a per-account basis.
Quick, final note about the spam filtering. I'm still trying to learn how it works, how strict it is, etc. While we had the 3rd account (mentioned above) still forwarding using the temporary addresses, we popped onto a spamlist for a few hours which caused all email leaving our server to Gmail's servers to be marked as spam. It's good that they went through to their system and weren't totally rejected, but the spam folder isn't normally available via 3rd party POP3 clients so it's almost as bad as them being deleted and gone forever.
All 3 accounts mentioned above are fully pointed to Gmail now via their MX records. If it wasn't such a painful process of have their domain's DNS zones hosted elsewhere, I'd probably do that also but things seem to be going well so far. Now that most of our off-site email forwarders are off our system, I'm hoping we're done with these spamlists for a while. DNSstuff.com and I are becoming pretty good friends unfortunately.
Small side thought: I'm not convinced yet that it actually wasn't Google that got us listed with the spamlists this last time, but that's the name of the game with forwarders I guess. I'm hoping that they'll start seeing our daily email notifications as more relevant emails and not consider that excessive volume which would look like spam. Fingers crossed. I feel like I'm back in high school trying to please everybody so everyone will like me.
I'm just finishing up with my yearly move (or what seems like anyway). Going from a decent size place with 2 roommates to a bigger place by myself. Kind of quiet. Kind of weird. Very empty. Gives me lots of time to think so I'll be posting more in recent days and weeks.
