If you aren't fully addicted to the Gmail interface, there are better options for business mailbox hosting.
My only gripe is the lack of support for two-factor authentication, apparently this is under development currently.
Otherwise I love them.
What I'd like is a service that kept my emails encrypted on-disk with my user password. Not because I think emails are private -- they're not in the sense that I fully expect someone could intercept them in transit, even if that would be illegal -- but just because it would give reassurances that my emails can't be data-mined for advertising purposes à la gmail, or if the mailserver had a major security vulnerability, a hacker couldn't copy all my emails wholesale.
But I don't know of any service that provides this, nor of a way to do it myself easily (any mailserver I set up myself would probably have far more vulnerabilities than one I rent from someone else!).
Best of both worlds.
Using Google Apps, all factors considered, seems to be less reliable than the old free Gmail. (Since Google can't pull the plug on you like it does to its paying customers, like this case)
Google can easily pull the plug on any Gmail account they want. It says so right in the terms of service. You have no guarantee of service or access to your data. Even higher profile reporters have had access to all their Google data (gmail, calendar, contacts, documents, google drive, etc) disabled for having what appeared to be client payment data in a single Google doc. They were only able to restore it after a few days because they had some connections.
- Having webmail which is not protected with two factor authentication
- Enabling POP/IMAP which also does not have two factor authentication
Think about failure like resistance. Points of failure in parallel gives less overall risk of failure. Points of failure in serial (like adding a front-end) gives greater overall risk of failure.
Forward to your firstname.lastname@gmail
Configure SMTP
Configure filters so you have a folder for company email
problem solved
It's a difficult compromise between availability and security/privacy. I want to be able to get at my mail from all my devices via any Internet connection, but. I still want privacy from dragnet intercept-and-record-everything surveillance.
My current plan - a mail server in the least US influenced jurisdiction I can manage, automatically encrypting all (unencrypted) email to a public key of mine, the forward the encrypted email to a gmail account. I can decrypt mail at the client on my phone/tablet/laptop/desktop, but I lose a lot of mail searchability this way.
What do you mean?
Then -- and this is where they destroyed my trust in their service -- I took a look at the status panel the following day, and they cleared the history of the downtime (it shows 30 days of issues). Instead of showing the issue, they marked it as green and deleted the messages describing the issue.
That day, I stopped using Rackspace for everything. (This was about a month ago)
Still disappointed they don't send out emails when there's downtime..
Would probably use them again the future. (This was my one negative experience with them, btw)
If my email goes down, getting a partial or full refund on my $2/month mailbox fee is the least of my concerns.
Thanks for posting this!