Gmail For Your Domain Review (Part 1)

I recently got my invite to Gmail For Your Domain, which basically lets me run Gmail as my back end to my personal domain email. I have been fed up with using the ugly webmail clients that come with my hosting company for a long time, but haven’t wanted to give up the luxury of my own domain name in my email. Enter Gmail For Your Domain, and my problem is solved.

Gmail For Your Domain has proved to be the answer to all my prayers. It gives me more storage space without having to pay, a better webmail user interface, and no more messing with Outlook’s crappy IMAP functionality. Ant to top it all off, I get 10 accounts for free on my domain; enough for myself and a couple friends.

Logging In

The login for Gmail For Your Domain is such a pain (mine is http://mail.google.com/hosted/northlander.org) that the very first thing I did was set up a redirect on my domain to point to it (webmail.northlander.org), which works out nicely and even automatically logs me in when I hit that address. No biggie there, and a transparent solution.

Customizing

Gmail For Your Domain lets you customize the icon the users see. As I am the only user, I didn’t decide to do that yet though I would if I had anyone else using the service. Nice touch.

Gmail Notifier Won’t Log In

One problem I had was that I couldn’t log into my Gmail For Your Domain account with Gmail Notifier. The problem was quickly confirmed to be a real issue with a look into the Google forums. I truly hope that this is going to get resolved soon.

One More Feature Please?

Gmail has always offered a feed display at the top of your email interface that you can add custom RSS feeds to, why not make Gmail For Your Domain automatically include the RSS feeds for the domain that a user is registered for? It would be a way to generate more traffic at little cost. And while you are at it, Google, let me put the login on my own website and style it to look like I want it. Selecting color and a redirect just doesn’t seem to make the quality cut for me.

Well, those are my thoughts after about the first day of use. I haven’t gotten a chance to really use it as my primary email because I am waiting for the MX entries to propagate. Stay tuned for part 2.

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