Google as Mail Server

[dan]

Isn't google overwhelming??? Google has more services than I can keep up with. It is probably a good thing, but at times I feel like I'm going to crash and burn trying to figure things out.

Most webmasters I know use a shared server. As your site grows and gets bigger, a lot of webmasters have to upgrade their server to virtual or dedicated at a costly price.

One resource that can get hammered on a shared server is your email server. All it takes is one idiot that is on your shared server to spam and your whole server goes down the drain. Even worse, customers may not get important emails -- like activation emails for membership.

We are to the limit as far as server resources go. I learned some tricks here and there to help optimize my server resources, but there are only a few things you can do before you have no choice but to upgrade -- maybe????

Google to the rescue. You can now use google mail server on your own domain/host. Yep, you are not dreaming, you can now use google resources instead of your shared host mail server resources to keep up with your domain emailing.

With that said, it still requires you to set things up starting with creating a google account, transferring googles mx (mail exchange) record to your server, etc. I already have my account setup with google, now for the technical stuff. At first I always feel overwhelmed. When it is all said and done, it may not be as big of a task as it seems.

I'm posting this in case there is another webmaster out there who is already using google as their mail server for their domain. If you are please contact me at:

http://www.filipinaeyes.com/online-dating-email-eyes.html

I think my biggest question is, once I get the mx record transferred, how do I set it up in my application (i.e. forum script, photo script, etc).

Of course being a cheap bastard, my goal is to extend the life of my shared server as long as possible. The more ways I can find to not use my server resources the better.

I'm still amazed and overwhelmed by google. I bet someday google will host my own domain for FREE. Won't that be grand.

I may post here any info I learn along the way.