Using gmail as your primary mail server

Solution 1:

We use it here, and I really like it. I just don't have to think about e-mail anymore — I can't think of any higher praise than that. That said, the switch was made before I started here, and so I have none of the political pressure that comes from such a move and didn't have to deal with any of the conversion issues.

Here is what I found:

• You tagged your question "pop3", but really one advantage here is that users will mainly use the web interface now rather than a pop3 client.
• That said, a lot of your users will still want to run Outlook (or whatever e-mail client they're used to). That's okay, but you should set them up using imap rather than pop3. Update It now supports a real windows mail profile via Google Apps Sync that works for Outlook very much like exchange did.
• A lot of tools (especially notification programs) don't work well with "Apps for domain" product. Even some of Google's own products (like the google home page) don't work. Update This has improved considerably.
• There is no good mail/calendar notification tool available for windows unless you go with a full imap or pop3 client. This is a big one, believe me.
• The outage problem isn't just whether their system goes down, but also that you lose all e-mail access when parts of your system (WAN connection) goes down. You can mitigate this somewhat by making sure everyone has a good local client, but remember that most e-mails at many places are sent between co-workers. Now a WAN outage will also bring down this "local" traffic. On the other hand, if your business has a lot of remote workers like sales people, this could actually be an advantage, because they'll still have access during a WAN outage.
• We still have an smtp service on one of our servers on site, but it's only used for internal systems (log messages, helpdesk mail, that kind of thing). No actual users ever touch it. It sends less than 50 messages in total per day and it's the only resource here dedicated to e-mail any more.
• There's a compliance issue, in that we can't fully disable the delete button. That said, with user training the archive feature is superior and should be a long term advantage in this area.

That said, I want to mention again that we really like it here. The service itself is probably more stable than our own e-mail server would be, and it's definitely going to work better off-premises. The spam and virus filtering are probably better than we could do on our own as well. All in all, it's a very low-cost way to provide a quality e-mail account for our students and staff (we're a small college).

My opinion is that gmail is a great fit here in part because it's what our students are used to (they prefer this to pop/imap system requiring Outlook/Outlook Express/Thunderbird and gmail's web interface is top notch), it serves all the students well (even exchange students) over the breaks, it works well for our recruiters and coaches when they're away, and does it for much less money and with much less maintenance than we could do it ourselves.

On the other hand, before most business can adopt it they need to provide a working notification application and fix the compliance delete button issue. Also, as a school we get the service for next to nothing, but for-profit business pays something like $50 per user per year. The stories I hear indicate the migration tools need some work as well.

Update
I had to go back through some of the docs from when we set this up, and I found this link:
https://www.google.com/support/hosted/bin/answer.py?answer=139019
from which I quote:

Google Apps for Education is free. We plan to keep the core offering of Google Apps Education Edition free. This includes user accounts for incoming students in the future. ... this is just one way we can give back to the education community.

The same section also talks about a for-pay add-on (no doubt based on Postini) called Google Message Security and Compliance you can buy that deals with the compliance and archiving issues I mentioned, but it's $45/user/year.

Solution 2:

I host some of my personal email there (not like "I have a gmail account" but actual domain email hosted there).

On the one hand, they're pretty reliable, and they're not likely to get taken down by any shmuck with a grudge against your company. You get a lot for free, and if you want more, it's pretty cheap. They do do decent spam filtering, and probably viruses as well, though I haven't even SEEN an email virus in so long, I've forgotten what they look like.

On the other hand, there have been a few significant outages lately. You have to decide for yourself as far as reliability goes. I wouldn't do it with professional mail, but I have the resources to pay for services like Postini (owned by google) and pay for security appliances, SAV gateways, etc, etc, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Edit: Sorry. Enterprisey, large business: shouldn't have said "Professional" because you can have a professional setup in any size shop.

I run mail servers for about a thousand people, I deal with a large volume of emailed image files, a decently large amount of encrypted email, and I run mail proxies, mail forwarders, dedicated antivirus gateways, multiple exchange servers, SAN mail stores big honking security appliances, and, above that, Postini.

My point is that, for what I need, I pretty much have to host it in house. If your needs are complex enough, you may have to as well.