Google Apps…

I’ve embarked on an experiment to use Google Apps in place of some of the tools that bluehost, my hosting company, allows. Don’t get me wrong, I like bluehost. I’m happy with the service, the tools, and most everything except, perhaps, the webmail system. To be honest I don’t even use the webmail that much. I pretty much use the Apple Mail app and IMAP to collect my mail. Still there are times…
I’ve got very limited needs. I wanted to incorporate Mail, Docs, Calendar, and Sites and I’ve only got a couple of users and they are all me. I may be incorporating this system on the system I manage that I’ve mentioned before, which is also hosted by bluehost, so I figured I’d better give it a try myself first.
A search of the help files for both Google Apps and bluehost didn’t quite explain everything to me. In fact I did end up somewhat confused, but in the end it turned out to rather more simple that I thought. I’ve got everything working and the only glitch, and it may not turn out to be one, is that I haven’t ported my old mail to my new mail system.
I’ve got to double check a few things first and I may try to write up a tutorial on how I did it as, contrary to most instructions I found on the web, I didn’t need to contact bluehost’s support center. I was able to make all the changes in cPanel.
And…in breaking news…I have been able to transfer my old mail from bluehost to my gmail account using gmail’s POP fetching utility. The trick, just in case I forget, is to avoid duplicating email names. That is, my old email was xxx(at)example.com. My new email is the same on gmail. However telling gmail to go get xxx(at)example.com failed for obvious reasons. Instead I told gmail to go get mail from transfer(at)example.com, but gave it all the other correct information. The other necessary trick is not to use mail.example.com but instead use the name of the bluehost box I’m on – boxXXX.bluehost.com.
Works like a charm.
Again, I’ll try to write this all up in a bit.
I’m off to play with all my new toys!
Aloha!