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Brief Explanation

I am currently hosting mine and all of my clients emails on my Linux server. However, in the past, despite having passwords that no human could possibly remember, let alone guess/hack, one of my email accounts has been hacked somehow. Not to mention the additional resource consumption that hosting email can cause and the required maintenance when issues occur.

I have therefore been looking at other alternatives, number one being Microsoft Exchange, hosted by a third party (quite expensive)...

But after revisiting this, I noticed that it might be possible to host these accounts on Google's server instead.

My Research

I have searched around the web and found a very helpful article here:

http://www.coffeecup.com/help/articles/set-up-gmail-for-your-own-domain/

This article seems to run you through how to point your email to the Gmail servers from your own server.

My Question(s)

Despite finding this article, I still have a few unanswered questions:

  1. Whilst this is a matter of opinion, is Gmail a reliable email provider?
  2. Do I have the ability to set up alias accounts and account forwarding? Very important!
  3. Is there a memory limit on the Gmail servers? Whilst I obviously set limits for my clients, I do not want them to be constantly having to empty there folders...
  4. Lastly, can I set up these accounts in Outlook? Also very important!
Ben Carey
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1 Answers1

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Whilst this is a matter of opinion, is Gmail a reliable email provider?

Define "reliable email provide". Gmail has service outages, see their Apps Status Dashboard for details, as does any provider. Google has their own Apps SLA, including credits for monthly uptime less < 99.9%.

Do I have the ability to set up alias accounts and account forwarding?

Yes, you may configure aliases and forwarding rules.

Is there a memory limit on the Gmail servers?

Although this may be an important feature for you now, it is mostly irrelevant when using a "cloud" provider. Google has sending limits for their services, but none are tied directly to what you would consider resource (memory, cpu) exhaustion.

Lastly, can I set up these accounts in Outlook?

Yes, you have a few options here: POP/IMAP or even Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. See also Google Sync for Mobile, CalDAV and CardDAV.

jscott
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  • Just to expand on this answer, we recently migrated from an internal hosted mail server to Google Apps and I have had nothing but problems with uploading data into google and working with outlook. It should be noted that ALOT of stuff is unsupported with Outlook and Google. There are currently multiple bugs with pretty much everything to do with Calendars and ICAL's. If you do decide to use google, outlook is not the best method to get your emails, use something like Thunderbird instead. – boburob Sep 25 '13 at 10:56