I'm considering saving money and time by retiring my qmail host and replacing it with Google Apps. I had a few questions, but couldn't find the answers in Google's documentation, so I was wondering if the empeg brain trust had any thoughts.

First, is it worth doing? It seems like it'll save me (some) money and (lots of) time.

Second, does Google Apps support suffix addresses? qmail resolves [email protected] to [email protected] transparently.

Third, what about private mailing lists?

I have been using it for my personal domain for a long time now and my employer for a slightly shorter time, and it works pretty well. The spam filtering is pretty good, but I have had a number of false positives, so I do need to check the spam folder regularly. Some false positives were very annoying - for example mail from a GMail user from the same domain who had sent it through the authenticated SMTP connection.



I know for certain that it works using a +, I haven't heard of a way to get it working with a dash.



It has Groups which should do what you want, but I haven't used it much.

Gareth

This is the one part that keeps me from moving my e-mail domain over to Google. I went with _ instead of +.

I guess I could define a catch-all account and then look at what arrives there to see which hyphenated email addresses are in use. Anyone tried that?

Yes, this works fine for me. I set the option below to catch any mail to addresses that have not been set up correctly. Once mail is arriving this way you can easily set up filters (in the target mail account) or new addresses (in the domain email settings) to deliver mail to the right place.

We've been using it for our company for over a year now because I simply got tired of fighting it out with the hackers and spammers.

It's worked great.

I literally spend about 10 minutes or less a month being a mail administrator now. No spam false positives for me.

The problem I have with that solution is multiple users. The suffix address was a very popular feature for a few of my friends hat use the domain, and odds are between a few of us, we probably have many hundreds of suffix addresses with some that aren't used frequently. I also don't want to sort through other peoples e-mail to get it to them, out of a respect for their privacy.

I think until google allows individual domains to change the suffix delimiter, I'm probably stuck running my own service for a while longer. On the plus side, the money I pay monthly for my e-mail server is also helping to pay for the boards.

Well, I pulled the trigger on this this morning. Should be complete in a couple of hours. We'll see how we get on.

Has anyone used Google Sites for a public-facing web site? Can it be used for a public-facing web site? Once I've moved my email, and found somewhere for my photo albums, the last thing to be moved is my website/blog.

Is this documented anywhere? I didn't see any mention of it on the help pages.

My dad and his wife built their website in google sites:
http://www.giteslabelle.eu/welcome

It works ok for simple sites, some things are a bit tricky to do though.

Sure is, and I've been using it for years. It's a great feature.

I have been thinking about moving various domains to Google for a while. I'm not so sure now though. I lost access to my Google calendars for 4 days this week without any real way of informing Google of the problem or finding out when/if it would be fixed.

Hopefully when you are signed up to Google Apps for domains there is some more useful support mechanism ?

Google Apps Premium has phone support. I signed up to Google Apps Standard because it's free, and I don't need 99.9% SLA.

Does standard actually have a sensible online support mechanism though ?

Not really. FAQ and Forum, as far as I can tell. On the other hand, it is free; what were you expecting?

Not a lot, but one person to monitor the forum would be nice. There were a whole bunch of people with the same problem but no sign that anyone from Google ever visits the support forum.

Because it's just family using the domain, privacy is less of a concern. I set up my account as a catch-all for the domain, and then when a suffix-addressed email arrives for the wife (as one did this morning), I simply forward it to the wife, and then set up a "nickname" (Google's term for an alias) to catch it in future.

There's a limited number of nicknames allowed, but it should be enough for our purposes.

So far, it's working fine, but I'm having trouble importing my old emails (not that I'm that bothered).

I'd kinda think that'd be a requirement, even for a free service. It'd be a pity if no-one from Google even monitored the forums.