After over a year of using Yahoo! Mail Plus as for my Carsurvey email hosting, I’ve made the switch across to Google’s Apps for your Domain, and I’m very happy indeed.
First, let’s say some things about Yahoo Mail Plus
Good stuff:
- They’ve always supported sending from your own domain, rather than the “user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain” used by the standard Gmail service (not the Google Apps service that I’ve switched too)
- They offer the ability to send SMS alerts to UK mobile phones based on certain criteria
- They can query POP mail on other servers for you. Nice for mail aggregation if you can’t forward mails
- The facility is offered to create temporary mailboxes to help avoid spam
- I could download my archive of emails in a zip file, to take elsewhere
Not so good:
- Their latest web interface doesn’t work on some browsers. Safari for example. So I was still using their old interface
- I could never find an easy way to check my email on my mobile phone or PDA here in the UK
- Their servers have gone down a few times, I’ve had people get bounce messages for my email
- I was having to route my email through my web server, which mean that if that went down, I lost email too
- The service cost £11.99 a year
Now for Google Apps
Good stuff:
- Free – in fact I was given twenty five 2Gb accounts when I only asked for one. And while the service is still in Beta, anyone who signs up can expect that the basic service will stay free for them after it comes out of Beta
- I was instantly approved for an account. No need to wait around for a few days
- The interface is far more snappy than Yahoo! To be fair though, I’ve only been using the service a few days. I especially like the spellchecker (nicer than Yahoo!), and the way it automatically saves drafts for you as you work
- Nice clean mobile interface
- Email is routed to them via your DNS MX record, so there’s no need to route through another server. This should make things more reliable
- I could load my old Yahoo! mail into Google. This took several hours using Google GMail Loader, and I got a few error messages, but I was pleased that it worked at all
Not so good:
- Adverts, but these seem relevant and not too in your face
- No option for UK SMS alerts. I never used this on Yahoo!, but I liked having the option available