Google Apps

Google Apps was mentioned on episode 207 of The Geek News Central podcast.  I wanted to check out how well it would work for my domains.  I currently have a server hosted that filters all of my spam and virus messages.  Switching to Google Apps could potentially alleviate me from having to maintain his server.

I switched one of my domains over there, and the transition went very smoothly.  I am not going to switch my main domains over there for a couple of reasons:

1. Folders – I use IMAP folders to organize my mail.  For example, each one of the mailing lists that I subscribe to gets automatically filtered into a folder.  Gmail does have "Labels", which let you create a virtual folder for certain mail.  Even with the Lables, all mail still remains in the Inbox, so viewing things that are labeled might be hard to do.


2. IMAP – I use IMAP to access my mail when I am using desktop computers.  IMAP allow all of the mail to remain on the server, and all clients can see the same mail messages.  Also IMAP supports folders, so my organization scheme works well.

The following idea is what would make Gmail work well for me.

• Create a setting in Gmail that only shows unlabeled messages in the Inbox. 


• Support IMAP access to the email account. 
  
  1. The mail messages listed in the Inbox IMAP folder would respect the above setting.
  
  
  2. Virtual IMAP folders would be created for each of the Labels, to access the labeled mail