Keeping Copies of Group Emails

One of the things that's a bit ghetto of groups in Google Apps is that groups are really just a glorified alias file. Users cannot manage their subscription, get emails delivered in batches, and there's no message archive unlike Google Groups or a Mailman managed list. And this is the same problem with Microsoft Exchange (at least up to 2007, probably 2010 too).

Okay, so ranting aside, here's a couple quick hacks to squeeze a couple features out of groups in GA.

Archiving. Create a mailbox, add it to the group. Shazzam! This is better in Exchange were you can share that mailbox easily with many users and limit them to read-only access so people aren't deleting your archive.

Mailing list features. Well, you're only answer for now is going to be to forward messages to a mailing list. So point mylist@example.com to mylist-example-com@googlegroups.com and members should subscribe directly to the Google Group instead.

Aliases. Now this is one feature I would have preferred in the face of the above limitations of GA groups. That is, if I've got a group called "hibuddy@example.com", I also want to have "heybuddy@example.com" and other variations. So here, create a mailbox called "hibuddy@example.com" and rename (or create) a group called "hibuddy-group@example.com". You can add as many aliases as you want to the mailbox, and then configure that mailbox to just forward to the group.

Ciao
- Arch

Google Apps

One of the cool services that Google offers is the hosting of various services for your domain. Basically, you can brand Google with your own domain including mail, calendar, chat, docs, sites and "mobile" (I haven't used "mobile", but it includes sync services). The service is called Google Apps.

The "standard edition" is pretty much the standard services and limits you to 50 user accounts. And 50 people is quite a few for a personal domain or even a small business. Once you need more features or more accounts, its $50 / year per account. Which, truth be told, is pretty cheap since even just paying for anti-spam/anti-virus filtering is about $30 / year for pretty basic service from Symantec of whomever.

At any rate, I found it a bit confusing at first but mostly because I was setting this up in a sub-domain (dl.thenibble.org) on GoDaddy. But once I got in, it's pretty easy. You get this dashboard which shows you which services are activated and you can just click on whichever ones you want and if DNS changes are required, it will tell you and give you pretty specific instructions. But there's a lot. You have to do one just to activate the domain, add aliases for all your services (unless you want to use google.com/apps/mydomain or whatever), and then for email, there's 5 MX records and for chat there's about 10 SRV records.

But now that it's all setup, it's pretty fancy. You can create email groups, use docs, publish calendars, etc. I tried poking around a bit and really all that Google does for stuff like "sites" when you create an alias under your domain is it just redirects the user to sites.google.com/domain/whatever ... So it won't be a replacement for having a web host. But for email, it will just accept mail at your domain so it's a full email service.

And standard edition is free. Did I mention that? Yeah, it's ad-supported, but otherwise free.

Fun!
- Arch