google apps

One of the best choices I've made recently was to stop hosting smtp for my domain on my server at home. A friend who always seems to be ahead of me in the computer world told me one day that he'd switched to using google apps for smtp for his domain and that it was great.

I'd been having trouble for a while with my smtp server because it is on a cable mode and so it's IP address changes occasionally, plus almost all rbls have those IP ranges designated as bad sources of spam, so a lot of my email was blocked as coming from spammer IPs. It was annoying. So one day it was causing trouble again, and I thought back to what my friend had said about google apps and just decided to give it a shot, figuring at worst I'd just have to switch my dns settings back to pointing to my home server.

It was amazingly easy to set up. Here's the link:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/resources/setup/

Now I don't have to worry about whether my email is being black listed by IP (assuming google can fix this problem http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/27/0045242), and I don't have to worry about my sendmail server being hacked, or my home server crashing, or the cable connection going down, etc. Google is always on, always answering, and much faster than my server could ever be.

Also, I've got access to my email through a web interface from anywhere I can get to the net. Very nice, and something I never got around to rigging up on my own server.

The only problem I've found is kind of confusing. I use thunderbird for my email application, and occasionally gmail just refuses to accept my credentials, even though they have been working all along. So I'll signin and check my email and then start surfing or something, and after a while thunderbird will say that the imap server responded that it needs my password or that my password was wrong. Well, it can't have been wrong, because it worked and it hasn't changed since then.

Now, I have no idea if the problem is with gmail, my google apps setup, or more likely a glitch between Thunderbird and gmail. Either way, it only comes up occasionally and it only lasts for short periods of time. Its not even bad enough that I've bothered trying to find what is causing it.

The only other problem I've had is that I haven't found a good way to get my many years of email archives up to gmail. My friend recommended imapsync, but I've not been able to get it to work. It says it can't connect to the imap server on my home server, but I can connect by hand, through thunderbird, or through an "openssl s_client -connect <server>" from the command line. So I know the imap connection works, I just seem to be doing something wrong with imapsync. Hopefully I'll find a different tool that works for me, or I'll figure out how imapsync works and get that working. I tried using thunderbird to just copy the folders up to gmail, but it just takes too long and eventually it gets disconnected and then I don't know which files have been copied and which haven't.

Yes...it's a lot of email. In theory I've got every non-spam email I've received since I got my first real unix login in 1992 and all of the email I've sent since about 1996. However, I don't believe that's true anymore. I think somewhere along the lines I whacked an archive I shouldn't have because I haven't seen them in a while. So...it may be significantly less than it used to be, but still much more than I want to move by hand or in small bunches.

I've still got my webserver running on my home server just so I have a convenient and local place to post my photos. I use Gallery2 which I like quite a bit, even though I can never get the damned upload functionality to work, and always have to put all the pictures up on the server, then upload them to Gallery2 via "local directory upload".