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Google Mail ??? / URL Hosting / Backing Up / Speed
#33862 04/16/15 09:12 PM
Joined: Aug 2009
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Joined: Aug 2009
Ok, here it goes:
A company using a web hosting service for their email addresses used the same domain name as their website. They wanted to use Google Mail because it was IMAP and could be picked up anywhere like aol, but mostly because it grouped conversations like Apple does now. So the mailboxes were imported many years ago.

I am now informed that the company no longer has to use their own web hosting service for their email and point it at a Google account, there is some simple way that Google hosts the mail directly and I can delete the user accounts on the current host. Right now on the current email host I get half of each conversation, which I keep, because when we first did this it seemed there was no way to back-up Google Mail, only the address book there. So, three questions here, can we lose our own mail servers but keep the URL, if we can, is there any downside to doing that and, I think I've asked this before, can Google Mail be backed up?

Next, the complaint is that although when they send emails the recipients get them right away, there is a long delay before they get their incoming. Don't know where the snag is. Client states sometimes she has to go in and manually do a 'check mail now.'

Client brought up the issue of eliminating our mail hosting and using Google which she believes now allows propriety URL addressing in the context of eliminating the problem of delayed receipt of emails. I'm not sure they are related. Note: There was a strange server full message some time ago that sounded like a prompt to buy more space from Google but it turned out that the web hosting mail servers were full.

Last edited by slolerner; 04/17/15 12:36 AM. Reason: Gratuitous Use of Commas
Re: Google Mail ??? / URL Hosting / Backing Up / Speed
slolerner #33905 04/20/15 07:57 PM
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the thing with domain names is when you own one, you can decide where ANYTHING that uses that suffix goes to. Most importantly, these can be different IP addresses.

So www.mydomain.com may point to your web server located in the basement of the small shop that does web page management for you and others. And mail.mydomain.com may point to a machine in other shop that's helping you with your email, or maybe to one of google's mail servers. And vpn.mydomain.com points to the vpn appliance at your business that lets you remote into your DB server from home. So all three of these use mydomain.com but all three have different IP addresses.

This makes it possible to put your mailserver on a different box, or even a completely different IP address / zip code. This has always been the case with domain names.

Mailservers have a little additional twist to them, that also ties into your domain name. "MX records" are attributes of your domain that tells any mailserver in the world where your mailserver is at. (since it doesn't HAVE to be mail.mydomain.com) When someone sends mail to dude@mydomain.com, their mailserver looks up mydomain.com and reads its MX record, and connects to the ip address it specifies, to drop off your mail. When google hosts your mail, you tell your registrar to point your MX record to the server they tell you to use, and it takes over from there. Instead of mail being delivered to your main box, its delivered to one of google's servers, waiting for you to pick it up there instead.

The delay could be caused by any number of things. First thing to check is simple, just look in the email client under Accounts and see how frequently it's checking for new mail. Unfortunately the other causes are probably mostly beyond your control and have to do with gmail itself. If you're getting the delays with your local mailserver, you really need a geek to stop by and poke around a bit.




I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Google Mail ??? / URL Hosting / Backing Up / Speed
Virtual1 #33909 04/20/15 08:08 PM
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Yes, there used to be a tab called Accounts and that is where the frequency of checking mail was, but I cannot find that tab now, it all looks different now. I am logged into their Google Mail, and I don't see anything you can set for frequency.

BTW, I did empty the old messages off the email from the web hosting site. Not sure this helped.

Oh, I found it. One thing, both POP and IMAP are enabled. Could that be the culprit? Or, does it need both because the mail on the web hosting account is the POP where the incoming mail is retrieved from?

Last edited by slolerner; 04/20/15 08:24 PM. Reason: more and more
Re: Google Mail ??? / URL Hosting / Backing Up / Speed
slolerner #33913 04/21/15 11:50 AM
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Originally Posted By: slolerner
Oh, I found it. One thing, both POP and IMAP are enabled. Could that be the culprit? Or, does it need both because the mail on the web hosting account is the POP where the incoming mail is retrieved from?


POP and IMAP are different methods of downloading mail to your client for reading. POP allows the client to delete old messages after they've been downloaded or deleted from your client, but IMAP has a lot more advanced features for synchronizing mailboxes.

Both POP and IMAP use SMTP to send mail.

One other major advantage of IMAP is the ability for several computers to be using the same mailbox at the same time, without losing mail. Changes made on one client get synced to all other clients. This also allows for reading your mail via webmail. But it also means that your mailserver will probably require more storage space since messages are being cached there.

So IMAP / POP are a bit of a tradeoff. Nowadays though with storage so cheap, IMAP is taking over, and will probably replace POP entirely in the near future. Neither should affect your mail client speed much. Though if you have a lot of mail in your IMAP account, you'll see a little lag when it has to sync changes. Receiving one or two new messages shouldn't have a noticeable impact. But this is comparing a change made on the client, not the server.


I work for the Department of Redundancy Department
Re: Google Mail ??? / URL Hosting / Backing Up / Speed
Virtual1 #33926 04/22/15 02:37 PM
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Apparently, in order to bring messages over to Google and get them to show up sorted into mailboxes, you must import them using POP. Then the mail is IMAP. I learned the hard way by disabling POP from Google Mail and it screwed it up. When I turned it back on, the accounts flooded with old email that was still at the web hosting site, (even though much had been deleted,) the inbox part of the mailboxes at the hosting site that were already forwarded to Google but I set to keep after forwarding, as described in a previous post in this string, to have a backup of at least one site of each conversation.

I quickly changed the POP setting in Google to enable POP only for that day instead of everything. An avalanche of emails that were from Google flooded the info@ account anyway, about 1,200. I emptied most of it previously, this was weird. I was able to catch one user's personal account that began to come through from the web hosting site despite defining the POP import day. That was 8,000 emails. I didn't look at how large the individual users accounts were and only deleted mail from the info@ box. I frantically deleted them from the web hosting site, leaving only about six months stuff. It was a wild ride.

The upside is that I was able to set the email originating at Google to be sent to the web hosting mailboxes first and sent out from there via SSL. It does not slow outgoing mail for whatever reason and I am able to retain a copy. No need to back up because the web hosting service also does a backup and space there is free. However, I am going to set space limits for each user so things don't get crazy, no more 8,000 eamils on a single account. Can someone suggest a reasonable limit to hold about 18 months email. They then remove older ones the same way as Time Machine does, years, months, days when space runs out.

I did instruct the client to delete as many emails from their Google mailboxes as possible. Am waiting to see if that had any effect.

Last edited by slolerner; 04/22/15 02:46 PM. Reason: accurate

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