I devoted a good part of this weekend to getting some virtual housekeeping done. Specifically, consolidating email accounts with Google Apps. I had email accounts from the businesses I’m closing, one from my ISP, a gmail account, accounts from my personal sites like Pursuing Holiness and Gitmo Cookbook, and accounts for various clients related to site maintenance.
I’m transferring the clients to someone else, so I won’t need those accounts anymore. Since I wanted a simpler email address, I bought a domain name from GoDaddy. (A dot-com with only seven letters, no punctuation, yay!) Then I set the domain name up under Google Apps, and used that to consolidate email accounts from my personal sites. Google Apps is doing about everything the Microsoft suite does, though not as prettily or quite as well. But it’s online, and opening up a new tab uses far less resources than keeping Outlook running with occasional forays into Word and Excel. It’ll be nice, also, to be less dependent on a specific computer. My recent malware episode convinced me of the benefits of not being too tied to any one machine, backups or no.
So now Kris and I have new email accounts which are not dependent on our ISP and are a variation of our last name. We get Gmail’s handy “conversation” layout, and all the other Google products like Calendar and Documents… along with a pretty nifty task manager. Because Google Apps accounts are separate from Google accounts (your standard Gmail account, plus whatever other features you activated) I had to set up BOTH, but I did so with identical logins, so it’s pretty seamless. Also, Google Apps has a pretty nifty import function, so I’ve now got email going back to 2006 in an easily searchable format – unlike Outlook’s annoying archive/search setup.
Finally, I set up iGoogle with all the gadgets I want and made it my new home page. Again, the basic Google account (which is what you sign into with iGoogle) is not the same as a Google App account. Which, again, is why I made the logins for both accounts identical. And this gadget helps tie the two accounts together.
All in all, I invested about $7.50 for the domain name and about four hours setting it up. Beats cleaning my closet. 
