Email Migration to GMail

Two years ago, I wrote a post called The Warhawk Flies that summarized my email server migration from Microsoft’s Exchange Server 2003 to the open source combination of Postfix and Cyrus IMAP. The move was both liberating and educational.

The experience with Debian, BIND DNS, MTAs and the IMAP protocol were well worth it and the server has been performing admirably ever since installation. Of course, hosting your own email server from your house isn’t without its drawbacks.

First is the actual server itself. Although the server is housed in a Mini-ATX case, it still takes up room and power. Then there is the noise. It’s much quieter than what I had before, by a measure of ten-fold, but it still gives off some noise. Most of the time I don’t care but sometimes I’d rather not have my home office sound like a mini server room.

Second is the maintenance. Backup routines, making sure that software and security updates are installed, and gawd forbid that there is an actual hardware failure. Most of these can be automated, but I’d rather spend my time doing something else.

Lastly, my notion of how email should work has changed. Although I was constantly squirreling away email in their own separate folders, I never actually found any old email by traversing the folder hierarchy; I simply searched for it. Google’s implementation of labels allow me to categorize and archive email without having to create a complex archival folder structure. At first I found this backwards, but the more that I used it at work the more I started to see the merits of adopting such a system.

With those drawbacks in mind, I started thinking about potentially moving my email and my email domain to GMail. After some deliberation and some clarification of what GMail’s service could and couldn’t do via our sysadmin (@demonbane) I decided to take the jump.

I signed up for the pro account ($50 a year per mailbox) so that I could use their IMAP4 import tools. You can cancel this after the free trial is over and I’ll probably do that because there is no compelling reason to keep my GMail account at the pro level.

Importing two mail boxes (my girlfriend’s and mine) took approximately 2 and a half hours. During that time, I changed all of my MX records to point to Google so that I would be up and running by the time the import was done.

Since I now have 3 GMail accounts that I’m checking (work, home and another domain that I manage), I decided to pick up a copy of Mailplane, which is basically an OS X application that wraps GMail, and allows you to switch accounts with a click of a button (probably the primary reason I chose to install Mailplane).

After the import was done, I tested inbound and outbound email and it worked flawlessly. No one on the outside could tell that my mail was now being routed and hosted at Google. Ultimately, I’m quite happy with hosting my email through Google.