This weekend I migrated the haruska.com email services and google calendaring over to google apps for your domain. It is a service by google that gives you most google apps (email, calendar, docs) and they’re set up in a domain that you own instead of google. In other words, all of your email addresses are from your custom domain.

Up until now, I’ve been using dreamhost to manage my email. I have to say that they do not have a bad setup for self managing. However, if you want to move to web mail, nothing really beats the gMail interface.

For calendaring, my wife and I were already using google calendar to manage shared appointments so this just brought them under the same domain. We’ve also started to use the google documents a bit to share and collaborate easily. Moving to the google apps for your domain just made all of these features located in one place.

I’ve already ran in to some issues or downsides with the move. I already had a google account with my primary haruska.com email address for calendaring and docs. This seems to confuse the google servers and it asks you to change the email address of the old google account. It would be nice if google could just recognize they’re actually the same. The same is true for the blogger account I had. Things don’t seem to be totally unified in login. Blogger isn’t available on “your domain” accounts, so you have to keep a separate google account for these extra apps if you want them.

However, overall I’m happy with the switch so far. There are a lot of 3rd party apps for gMail and I’m not tied to the IMAP / WebMail solution from dreamhost. This is just part of the overall trend of migrating more and more of my apps to the web browser.