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While I may question their dedication to their motto (”Do no evil”) at times, on the whole Google provides a suite of very useful products for an extremely low price: free. Hard to argue with that, especially when GMail rocks my world.
Google really needs to work on its support documentation and sales copy, as I wouldn’t be writing this blog post if their services and their limitations had been expressed clearly. (Hey Google — I know a great writer you can hire!)
You can port all of your existing POP/IMAP accounts into your free GMail account. You can also send from any email address, provided you have access to it in order to click the link in their confirmation notice. Great. What they don’t tell you is that every header on every outgoing message will then include this line:
From: yourusername@gmail.com On Behalf Of Your Name (theemailyouthoughtyousentfrom@yourdomain.com)
This isn’t hiding in the extended headers somewhere… this is right there for everyone using Outlook and other mail programs to see. It’s to protect against spammers using the service, but mostly, it’s annoying. It’s also not mentioned anywhere, except in user forums where fellow GMailers explained that you can avoid this by paying $50/year to signup for Google Apps for your Domain.
I finally fork over my $50, only to discover mid-process that they limit the number of domain aliases you can use. (I have 24 separate domains + misspellings of some of those domains.) I think I got to #13 when I was greeted by a mean little red sentence informing me I surpassed this undisclosed limit. Obnoxious!
I also kept getting a mysterious “temporary 502″ error when I tried to access various pages:
Temporary Error (502)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors. You won’t be able to use your account while these errors last, but don’t worry, your account data and messages are safe. Our engineers are working to resolve this issue.
Please try accessing your account again in a few minutes.
Mind you this error persisted for three days, not a few minutes.
Two emails back and forth with support later, I got zero help. They kept reminding me to change my MX records. Yea, that’s what I’m going to do, send my MX records your way when you can’t explain why half my clicks result in an error message.
I’m sure I could pay $50/year/per domain to avoid this problem, and then port those 24 accounts into another GMail account, but I don’t feel like paying $1200/year for the privilege.
In the end, I deleted my Google Apps account, ported all my domains through a single Fusemail.com account (on the suggestion of my new hero, PickledOnion), and continue to check via free GMail via POP. I also continue to get the annoying “On behalf of” header line, which will continue to piss me off.
Google, you’re doing something wrong if I cancel my paid account for your free service. Something to chew on.
Marina,
Google Apps only charges you for if you want 25gb of storage. Their free version (of 6.75gb) should work for most people.
That being said, it’s very easy to get all your aliases sent to that one email address with Google Apps…but I can see your frustration with trying to get the correct From address in there–because then you’d be back to where you started with “on behalf of” business. An easy workaround would be to use a desktop client when sending messages from those other domains–Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, etc would all do the trick without the “on behalf of”…
I continue to recommend Google Apps to small businesses, but you’re right that it’s not for everyone. Especially if one wants support. Sorry you had such a bad experience.
Comment by Jared Goralnick — July 6, 2008 @ 10:48 am
Hi Marina,
For anyone serious about their email, I suggest using Fastmail.fm. Despite the odd top level domain .fm, they’re an Austrialian outfit with servers based in NY and Texas. They’re *very* reliable, and you can do just about anything emailwise. Highly recommended.
-bert
Comment by Bert Plat — July 25, 2008 @ 3:00 am
[...] (When you send mail from your POP account using the free edition of GMail, your @gmail address will be listed in the email headers. You can avoid this minor inconvenience by paying $50/year for Google Apps Premier Edition, but we don’t recommend it.) [...]
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