So I run my own server to host my sites as well as a few others. I haven’t had a lot of time to maintain it, and it’s running a horribly out of date OS and services. Last week a friend of mine who is a client needed PHP 5 installed, so I decided to just hand compile a version (which I had been doing for work anyways). Went pretty much without problem, except it broke SquirrelMail, so I had to update that too (it came built in with the OS, so needed to configure a stand alone version). Now I’ve also compiled Apache 2, I just have to make the config files for all the vhosts and switch over.

But anyways, back to Google. The email system on the server is the one area that I don’t have a ton of knowledge on. The spam filter worked for a while, then stopped. I fixed it once, but it only worked til the next reboot… I would prefer to get email off the server and just concentrate on the webserver side. To that end I decided to look at Google. My work (Oakland University) is in the middle of a switch to Google for email services. Right now all students are on the system, and the employees move in a few days.

The school has arranged full support and no ads, something they usually charge $50/user/year for, for free - the school is paying absolutely nothing… And we are talking tens of thousands of email accounts. I swear, Google is just doing it’s best to take over the world, one email account at a time, it’s the only thing that makes any sense to me.

Well, for people on a slightly smaller scale and not in the EDU market, they still offer free domain email hosting. You see the normal text ads that are in gmail, and you don’t get support or transition tools, and look to be limited to 100 accounts per domain, but otherwise it’s the whole shebang. So now all my deadendsw.com, ericmblog.com, and ericmphotography.com email is hosted on Google servers. If it works out well, I might press the people using my server for email to move also.