Thoughts on Gmail’s domain hosting

Posted Friday, August 18, 2006 at 11:39am in Technology  | 

Some time ago I signed up for Google’s Gmail domain hosting service which is still by invitation only at this time. I’ve since received my invite and have been toying around with it using this blog’s domain (prblogger.com) as my Gmail domain. I.e. (stephen at pr blogger dot com)

I’ve been a Gmail user for over a year now and have to say I’m pretty impressed with the new developments Google’s doing with its email service. I’m considering shifting my regular personal Gmail account over to this one. However, there are one or two niggling issues which I’ll mention later.

Included in the invite are the instructions to change the MX records within your blog’s hosting service. Google has made the set up process pretty straight forward and by following the instructions you should be up in no time.

Once you’re up and running the administrator is given a dashboard from which they can carry out a number of tasks such as creating a new user, add email addresses, enable/disable chat, set up catch-all addresses and a few more.

Creating an email list

Once you’ve set up an email address you can view it by pointing your browser at http://mail.google.com/hosted/YOURDOMAIN.com. There, you’re prompted to enter you login details which then takes you to your account. Nothing different from a regular Gmail account except you’re given an option to upload your own logo which replaces the regular Gmail one.

I just did a simple crop of this blog’s header. Looks ok though.

From the administration you can also keep tabs on how many addresses there are, what each individual’s storage space is and the last time they logged in.

I only have two addresses set up so far. One is for me and the other is for… ahem, me.

In the domain settings you can carry out a number of tasks like uploading your logo, change your sign in box colour (this is my sign in page), adjust time zones and enable/disable contact sharing.

Gmail also integrates your own Google Calender too. Not sure if you can synch dates, notes etc with other users but if you can’t now, I imagine Google will do it in the future. Here’s my calendar page:

All in all I like it and think it’s got a lot of potential particularly to small organisations. But as mentioned, there’s one or two issues. First, is mobility. I’m a frequent reader of my Gmail emails using its mobile service. However, I can’t log into my hosted domain account using my phone. This, for me, is a big deterrent. It does say in my inbox that I can but no success yet!

UPDATE: Success. I just pointed my phone’s browser to the my regular sign in page and it redirects to a mobile version. Once signed in my custom logo is viewable too. Cool.

The second is that it doesn’t work with the Firefox extension, Gmail Manager. I have a couple of Gmail accounts and this alerts me to incoming emails in multiple accounts perfectly. Shame it doesn’t include hosted Gmail accounts too. Maybe the developer will update it so it does.

I don’t know if Google plan on making this a paid service or for free? Doesn’t say anything on the homepage.

I’ve seen some blogs actually asking visitors to make their own Gmail address using their domain, but I’m not entirely sure I’d want just anyone using my domain to send emails.

Pretty good though.

technorati tags: gmail, gmail+hosting, email, stephen+davies

Related Posts

• Analyse your FeedBurner feeds better 12.06.
• MCWS - Future of mobile & online content 02.29.
• The growing European internet 10.18.
• O2 Xda Orbit 2 02.20.
• The Chinese internet 02.07.

• Next post: « How Web 2.0 is your newspaper?
• Previous post: When a PR agency partners with a media company »