I like using an email address at my own domain. Why?
- It’s portable. My email address can’t be held hostage by any single hosting provider or ISP. I own the domain, so I can move to a different email provider in a matter of seconds by making a few DNS changes.
- It’s easy to remember. It’s my first name at my full name with a dot com at the end. What could be easier than that? No numbers, no punctuation, no spelling bees. (Unless you can’t spell two biblical first names, but then you’ve probably got bigger problems to worry about.)
- It has branding built in. Some people visit this site because it’s hidden in plain sight right there in my email address. It’s free publicity.
I also like using Gmail. I’ve had an account since May of 2004. I like the search. I like the archiving and the labeling. I like the amount of storage space. I like the constant improvements and beta features (Gmail Labs). I like the integration with my Android-based phone. Well, let’s just say that I like a lot of things about Gmail.
You’d think, then, that Google Apps would be the natural way to bridge those two things. For a variety of reasons I’ve already written about, though, it’s not. Most importantly, a lot of people have Gmail/Google Accounts with a long history (i.e., almost seven years) and tons of services attached to them. Some services are movable between Google Accounts, but most are not (not cleanly or easily, at least). And that’s exactly why Google needs to introduce the service I’m about to describe below.
What I’m proposing is a halfway point between Gmail and Google Apps. Let’s call it Google MX for the purposes of this post. If you wanted to get really creative, you could even call it something like Google Hosted Mail Routing. But since that name is incredibly lame, and since this is my idea, I’m going to keep calling it Google MX. Here’s what I’m envisioning: you modify the MX records for your domain to specify that Google should handle your incoming mail (just like Google Apps). From a simple control panel, you would set up aliases for your domain, but instead of creating any new mailboxes, everything would be delivered into a pre-existing Gmail account.
I’m positive that the infrastructure to support something like this is already in place. For example, Google Apps allows you to add equivalent domains and aliases, so it would just be a matter of pulling that functionality out and repackaging it into a separate product. It could even be a sub-product of Google Apps for all I care. You would set up your MX records exactly the same way, so it might make the most sense as a delivery option for a Google Apps address. Instead of delivering mail to a Google Apps mailbox, you’d be able to choose a Gmail mailbox instead.
I have a feeling that there a lot of people out there using the free version of Google Apps with just a single email address, and I’d be willing to bet that most of them had an existing Gmail account prior to signing up for Google Apps. With my imagined service, setting up a full-blown Google Apps domain would no longer be necessary, nor would you have to migrate all your stuff over from one account to another (disregarding for a moment the fact that some Google services can’t be migrated, period).
Right now, I’m using Pobox to forward my domain mail to my Gmail account, and it’s a workable solution. They have a really solid reputation, great customer service, and excellent spam filtering. It just seems like an unnecessary extra step given what we know about the Google services that currently exist. Why not cut out the middleman and have messages delivered straight to my Gmail account at the SMTP/MX level instead of having to proxy them through another service?