For those of you in hibernation for the last few years, Google is taking over the world, one free service after another.  This weekend I decided to break ties with Godaddy’s crappy email hosting (5 accounts, 1 GB storage, $20 year) and switch to Google Apps.   My reasons were quite simple, Free is Free and I really wanted IMAP support.  I know that the risk is pretty high with “big brother” now in control, but for IMAP support and >6 GB of storage per account, I think it is worth the risk.

For the most part the switch was painless.  The first step in the process was to create an account and prove that you own the domain.  Proof is achieved by creating a custom CNAME record in your DNS that maps to google.com.  Once the domain is validated you can begin creating user accounts.  In my situation I only had 5 accounts so I created them manually, but for larger organizations they have a “csv” upload utility that imports a large batch.  Once I created all of the accounts, I added any necessary account alias (they call them nicknames) and then switched my hostnames MX records.  Google warns that it could take up to 48 hours, but in about a hour the changes had propagated to my internet provider.

If you choose to make the switch, make sure that you tell of of your users to access there new account via the web first.  Google makes you enter a “captcha” image and agree to a terms screen.  Once this is completed you can enable IMAP support and import you existing email.  Google does NOT provide an import tool, not even from one Gmail account to another.  The approach most take, is enable POP access on your old account, and suck in all of the email using there Mail Fetcher.  Make sure that if you had “labels” you recreate those before importing as well as manually create all of your filters.