Google Apps, Email, and a Linode web server

@kpm:

My question is, I'm setting up a site for someone who is already actively using their Google Apps and Mail, and I'd like to edit the domains A records and Name Server to point to my Linode Server, will doing so have any adverse impacts on their current mail or services?

There should not be any effect on the MX records if they stay the same. If you are just changing the A record(s) for the website, then the only impact would be the amount of time for the old record(s) to expire from the Name Servers caching them. In other word, there might be a period of time when users would get the old website; if the old A records for the website(s) were cached on the Domain Name Server(s) they use.

If you are not in a big hurry and to minimize the time of cache records during your switch over, I would suggest lower the TTL (Time To Live) on the current records you plan to change. Then after the amount of time of the old TTL has past, make the change(s).

–

Travis

Thanks for the help!

A little of subject here, but KPM - do you send emails out from your web server and if so do you send them out through the Google Apps email server for the sites you host? The reason i ask is that have a server that i'm setting up and i think i would be much easier to have Google handle the email for the domain but i also need the ability to send out emails from the website. I found info about a 2000 emails/day per account through google apps. Anyway, just wanted to know if you have any experience this…

Thanks….

-Michael

which uses a free Google Aps account… but I don't have any constraints since I don't need to send many emails…

I think if you pay the $50/year/person for a google application biz account, you may be able to send more than that… but I have no experience with this.

Good luck.

Thanks for the quick reply….yeah, i couldn't find anything about sending more if i used the Premier (it would be worth it if i could). I'd like to setup my own mail server since i'm new at this i think it would be a big hassle to get it running smoothly and keep it secure.

Thanks…

@michaelp:

Thanks for the quick reply….yeah, i couldn't find anything about sending more if i used the Premier (it would be worth it if i could). I'd like to setup my own mail server since i'm new at this i think it would be a big hassle to get it running smoothly and keep it secure.

Thanks…
How many messages do you actually think you need? You could always create a few different service accounts in your Google Apps setup, and just share the outgoing messages across them. Inbound replies could all still be forwarded to a single mailbox.

– David

@kpm:

I think if you pay the $50/year/person for a google application biz account, you may be able to send more than that…
I don't use google apps, but this has some google suggestions for working around the limits. It says the 2000/day limit is what applies to the paid version, and it looks like you only get 500/day from the freebie.

I don't believe I've tried send emails from the server yet. I think I would just install Drupal's SMTP module if my server is blacklisted. I also think I will be using google apps as my mailserver for sites.

tl;dr: Off-topic rant about how expensive Google Apps is

It's the 50 accounts total that's our biggest concern. There's a huge wall between the free and paid version. It doesn't seem so big, just to say "$50/user/year", but the problem is that you're free up until you hit the 51st user, after which you need to pay for all of them…

In effect, 1-50 are free, user 51 costs $2550 per year… For a small non-profit like us, that's insanity (and probably 5-6x our entire IT budget). Google's "free-for-non-profits" doesn't apply to non-US non-profits, and even then, I'm not sure if it applies to non-charitable organizations.

We'd love to use Google Apps, but it's incredibly expensive when we can just pay Linode for our VPS (which we'd already need with or without mail) and manage our own opensource software. Maybe for a business, where people are being paid salaries to manage things, the decision making process might be different. We're staffed with volunteers, however, so the equation ends up being "Do it yourself: $0. Let Google do it: $3000+)

@Guspaz:

We'd love to use Google Apps, but it's incredibly expensive when we can just pay Linode for our VPS (which we'd already need with or without mail) and manage our own opensource software. Maybe for a business, where people are being paid salaries to manage things, the decision making process might be different. We're staffed with volunteers, however, so the equation ends up being "Do it yourself: $0. Let Google do it: $3000+)
Yeah, if you're just around the 50 account boundary (too large for standard, too small for premium) it's a tough point to be at. Doing it yourself is always possible, but I have to admit that Google Apps - of which I only really care about email and calendar - really simplifies my life as an administrator. Not having to worry about the SPF mess and some random target domain rejecting messages is a relief.

Though not necessarily ideal, there are some intermediate options that can let you stay with standard with just a little extra work on your part.

How many actual accounts do you need? Does your organization have any logical divisions (seems plausible if you have more than 50 people). You can create individual Google Apps accounts for sub-domains of your main domain (corp, hr, sales, location/office, whatever), then it would just be a 50-account limit per sub-domain. I do that to separate a corporate domain from domains for individual sites we operate, even though we don't need 50 accounts in total.

If people still want public addresses in the top level domain, you can use groups as aliases at that level to direct the mail to the sub-domain, and they can set their individual account to use that address when sending mail. Not sure if Google Apps standard has a limit on groups, but if so, you could always use Linode just to accept/forward top level messages, so no limit to aliases.

This is more work, but almost entirely up front one time setup, and you still get to offload all the ongoing mail management, and let users have the other Google Apps features.

– David

I think we've somewhere between 30 or 40 publicly published mail addresses, and then various non-published addresses. 50 accounts per subdomain could stretch that much higher, but it's not really as pretty on business cards (and gets a bit strange for a non-profit like ourselves that doesn't have a traditional corporate layout). The equipment department is inside the operations department, so right now we have operations@otakuthon.com and equipment@otakuthon.com, but trying to combine those into operations@operations.otakuthon.com and equipment@operations.otakuthon.com gets long and confusing.

A mail server doesn't require very much maintenance. They pretty much run themselves, only really need intervention if there is some sort of issue with other peoples' spam filters, and that's not really a problem with our server…

I also don't think that the standard edition has the kind of centralized control and auditing support that we need (premier seems to).

@Guspaz:

I think we've somewhere between 30 or 40 publicly published mail addresses, and then various non-published addresses. 50 accounts per subdomain could stretch that much higher, but it's not really as pretty on business cards (and gets a bit strange for a non-profit like ourselves that doesn't have a traditional corporate layout).
That's why I suggested the groups - so in the top level domain you make a group for operations@toplevel that just forwards to operations@secondlevel. The account holder for operations@secondlevel configures the account to use operations@toplevel on outgoing mail. Extra work to setup, but one time only.

Groups don't appears to count towards the user count, though I don't know if they have their own limit (if so, then using your Linode to receive top level mail and just alias/forward it is a solution that may even be easier to maintain in any case).

> A mail server doesn't require very much maintenance. They pretty much run themselves, only really need intervention if there is some sort of issue with other peoples' spam filters, and that's not really a problem with our server…
Yeah, a year or two back I was completely in the "run my own mail server camp", but then I'd hear about horror stories about places like yahoo rejecting legitimate mail from smaller setups and being tough to correct, so I'm no longer as certain. Depending on your user base it doesn't really help if the problem isn't with your server if the mail still doesn't get through. Likewise it's easy to pick on yahoo as being a traditional spam haven and unresponsive, but that doesn't help the person on your server needing to send to someone with a yahoo account. Plus working with Google Apps has worked well - probably better than I expected.

> I also don't think that the standard edition has the kind of centralized control and auditing support that we need (premier seems to).
Yeah, that's a per-circumstance thing. And splitting out the accounts ups the workload on that a bit, although the same administrator would just have an admin account in each domain.

Certainly nothing wrong with running your own setup - I just wanted to point out that the account limit and pricing differential with premium does have some other alternative workarounds if needed.

– David