The Transition to Google Apps for all my Mail
November 21st, 2008I recently purchased a Google Apps account so I could use GMail with my non-GMail address. In the process, I did the following:
- created a Google Apps account for my domain (aarone.org),
- configured my domain host (GoDaddy) to send mail for my domain to GMail,
- transferred all messages from my old GMail account to the new GMail account,
- transferred all messages stored on my computer to the new GMail account.
None of this is very hard or exciting but this blog has nothing better going on so why not document the process?
I have a fairly large archive of mail that takes me back to about 2001. This totals about 20,000 personal emails. I currently store this email in Mail.app and back up my mail to my Time Capsule.
In addition to this email, I also have a GMail account that I primarily use as a destination for mailing lists. I have about 200,000 messages from mailing lists at my GMail account along with a few thousand personal emails. GMail tells me I’m using 1115 GB (15%) of my 7265 GB. I have IMAP access setup to GMail and use Mail.app to view most of this mail.
This setup for mail has some limitations:
- to check my email at my @aarone.org address, I need my laptop and Mail.app,
- i’m in responsible for backing up my data,
- i have multiple accounts for different purposes (personal email and lists)
I decided to create a new GMail account for my aarone.org address and move all mail I have to this account. Google Apps is a great service that is targeted toward organizations who need basic ‘productivity apps’ (hate that term) like email, calendaring (i hate that term too), messaging, etc. For $50 a user, your organization can have Google host services using your organization’s domain. In my case, my organization is one person and the only service I’m really interested in is email.
Domain Configuration
After I created my Apps account, I needed to configure my domain host to update the MX record for my domain to point to Google. This was kind of non-intuitive because the instructions on Google’s site for my domain host (GoDaddy) assumed that you were hosting your site (not just your domain) with GoDaddy. The instructions refer to the ‘Total DNS’ feature in GoDaddy that is not available if you don’t use GoDaddy’s name servers.
At that point, I configured GoDaddy as the host for my domain. I had some credits that allowed me to do so for free which was surprising (GoDaddy attempts to charge you for just about anything). Then, using the ‘Total DNS’ feature I manually configured an MX record (mail) for Google and an A record (primary) for my web host (in my case Joyent).
You should now be able to test your DNS settings using a tool like dig. In my case, the authoritative nameserver for my domains is NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM. I can check the A record for my domain using dig as follows:
dig @NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM aarone.org
which should print a response like:
;; ANSWER SECTION:
aarone.org. 3600 IN A 8.17.170.107
indicating that the IP 8.17.170.107 should be used for aarone.org.
To see where mail goes for your domain, you can do the following:
dig @NS51.DOMAINCONTROL.COM aarone.org MX
which should display an answer section with the Google mail servers you entered if you followed Google’s instructions.
Configuring Mail Clients
At this point, mail sent to my aarone.org address was directed to my Google Apps mail account. I setup my old GMail account to forward all mail to my new GMail account and setup my new GMail account to filter my lists to the appropriate labels. I also configured Mail.app to show the new account using IMAP which left me with three email accounts in Mail.app. In a little while, I’ll only have one.
Transferring Mail Between GMail Accounts
I now wanted to move all the message from my old GMail account (my @gmail.com address) to my new GMail account (my @aarone.org address). I could have probably done this transfer with IMAP using Mail.app but I chose to use Google’s Mail Fetcher feature of GMail. I turned on POP access on my old GMail account and setup Mail Fetcher to fetch mail from the old account into my new account.
This bad thing about Mail Fetcher is that it chooses to periodically transfer 200 messages between accounts and then waits around idle for a anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. At this rate, it will take a long time to transfer all my mail but I’m not too concerned about that. The transfer occurs entirely on the server side so it will simply progress over the next few days (or weeks or months) until all my mail is transferred.
Transferring Mail Between Old IMAP and New GMail
The last step will be to move all my mail from my local machine to my new GMail account. I plan to simply use IMAP and Mail.app to move the messages.
One of the cool things about GMail on Google Apps versus the free GMail account is that IMAP doesn’t flake out quite as easily. Copying many messages using IMAP on my free GMail account always crapped out in mid-transfer, presumably to keep resource usage under control at the Google. Copying thousands of messages from my local machine to GMail via IMAP just works.
Conclusions
So far this transition has gone smoothly. The transfer of all messages is going to take a while but will eventually will end. Having a single place for my mail and having that sync’d with my mail client will make my life easier. If some radically awesome email provider appears or GMail becomes undesirable, I can always use POP or IMAP to suck all my messages off of GMail and put them somewhere else.

