Setup DNS properly with your DNS provider.

Helps out tremendously.

You have to setup them up once you start, something like this (in bind)(others similar):

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 5 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 10 aspmx2.googlemail.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 10 aspmx3.googlemail.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 10 aspmx4.googlemail.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 10 aspmx5.googlemail.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 1 aspmx.l.google.com.

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN MX 5 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.

You first have to verify that you own the domain.

Once you do that, all you have to do is also set you SPF record properly, something along the lines of:

cooklikeyourgrandmother.com. 3600 IN TXT "v=spf1 +mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com -all"

If you also want, to make the real SPF DNS record, but only the absolute *LATEST* DNS server stuffs support it, so its not really needed yet.

And you aren't having services outages NOW without recourse? (SPAM, rejected messages, etc...)

Come on... the service outages you have heard about are *NOT* any worse than *ANY* other service *AND* there *IS* nothing to adjust to.

IMAPS works *JUST FINE*.

They will migrate 100% of your existing e-mail if its on a publicly available server, there is a migration assistant.

Paranoia about outages are very over-blown, its because its "Google", remember HotMail when Microsoft took it over?. The worst *I* have had and *WE* have been using it for nearly 2 years now... a bit sketchy with an external e-mail client, the web-browser interface has only ever been a bit slow during problem times.

Google Docs, Hosted e-mail, "sites" an awesome calendar, up to 50 users without much issue. Archives and rules and responsive people.

Get over your paranoia and just take the plunge.

And yes, you could only send through it.

But you are definitely not thinking through. Do you honestly think *ANY* provider will listen to you if you have an issue that they don't want to address? Get over yourself. Until you flash the cash and have a fully paid enterprise license/subscription for *ANYTHING* you are a small fish.

The Apps and e-mail aren't part of you direct payment scheme, just tools to help you get there.

If you want to make it hard, fine do that, but then stop asking paranoia induced questions about it.

I gave you a solution using a very reliable service, that IMO, offers much more than *ANY* other mail hosting provider... and allows you to do anything you want for basically scratch for cost.

The only thing *YOU* have to get past... is your over arching repulsion to using Google.

Trust me when I say this:

When I was first being told I had to use this service and completely rely on Google to "be a good company and do no evil"... I was extremely skeptical. In fact, I thrashed on it for weeks. Finally, the CEO told me to shut up and ignore your personal alarms going off for a few weeks. Then if you still have issues, we can discuss it. I did that and most of my uncomfortableness has gone.

All in all, *I STILL* hate the way Google Docs works in most instances, as its hard to get the spreadsheet stuff to work the way *I* want them to. But in general, the entire experience has been very up and down, but in the complete arena of what we do, (SaaS), its very... nice to not have to run around to the 50 different locations for info... for anything you want to do its just plain good enough.




I'm not saying you have to switch, but come on, let us be real here, you HONESTLY believe that Google will be a Microsoft in the long run? Sure there will always be the Vocal minority against Google (include Microsoft in that vocal group) and Google faux-pas will happen regularly. Google takes its services *VERY* seriously, as compared to Microsoft... (refer you to your XML parser issue). Google's support has been more than usable and has actually helped things get fixed. They are plain and short sometimes, but it gets the job done and without fluff. We have had about 40 tickets open with them so far and all have either been fixed or explained.

But the Vocal Minority for Microsoft has *ALWAYS* been much larger and been poo-pooed away by them and nobody has taken them to task as they *DO NOT* respond in normal ways.

When has Google *REALLY* been evil? Sure they have some draconian rules on ads and TOS, but that is because of people gaming the system. They have also said ... oops on some operation issues. So, ho often does the Bank you work for... change the email system out from under itself? Or release new features or improve distributed content delivery or release new products all while still being live?

I don't care to use Google for everything, but since I am for nearly everything work related, its... been fairly easy and is a known quantity. Stop complaining about your fear of reliance on a single point of service. You can still save everything locally and archive it local. But... to be honest, you are swatting at imaginary flies.


I don't know what to tell you.

But yes I understand.

I'm not really saying its nirvana, but things "just work".

If you want to beat down Google, fine.

I'm not taking it personal, just giving you my personal view on it.

And yes, personally, I'd rather be using GroupWise from Novell for all this crap... but you know, its just not in the cards.

Summary:
Yes you can *just* send from Google, but you should also have your domain serviced from there for mail. You can remove all mail just like any other pop service and be done with it. That way you can just manage all groups and aliases from hosted gmail.

Last word I'll say on this.

And you offer collaboration services NOT tied to Sharepoint and Exchange? (not Crappy Zimbra either?)