I'm sure people will help you here, but Media Temple's Tech Support will probably be of more immediate help to you... once you sign up for your account, you should be able to get someone on the phone and give you step by step instructions.

Tony

There's a good G&G podcast called 'Switching Webhosts' from June:
http://geeksandgod.com/episode89

They give some great advice about how to change a web host, the process to follow, etc. Highly recommended.

Alan.

@anthonypero Thanks for the idea. I have heard that Media Temple has really good tech support. So I will check with them and see what kind of support they provide moving e-mail to there servers you sign up.

@aforsyth I have listened to that podcast, it is very informative, and I will for sure go back and listen to it again before I make we switch hosts. But the things they describe in it on moving e-mail is beyond my tech know-how.

Again I am still kinda of new to server stuff. And REALLY new to managing e-mail accounts.

Thanks for the input guys it is so appreciated.

Perhaps it's a bit of an oversimplification but email is email. Right? This is especially true if we're not considering processing mailing lists.

Also, moving from one hosting company to another is troublesome. Moving a website may be fairly straight forward, but moving email accounts for many users is a hassle. Their email clients may require changes and how do you transfer their passwords, even if you don't change server names?

So, I recommend moving email to Google Apps. This separates email processing from web hosting. It seems to me that we are much more likely to need to move our websites to a new host than to change email providers. If you need to move your site again (sometime in the future) and Google is hosting your mail then all you need to do is insure that your new DNS mail records are correct before you switch name servers.

Churches (read 501(C)(3) organizations) can get Google's Education package for free. Here are the advantages that I see:

• Dependable service
• Access via POP, IMAP, and webmail
• Use your own domain name
• Good junk mail filtering
• FREE

Google also has documentation about the process.

Just my 2¢ worth,
Curt

I agree wholeheartedly... we switched to Google Apps at the TV station I work at for email, and everyone started using the document feature as well for files and simple shared spreadsheets, cause it's so much easier than emailing files back and forth, or checking out files from our own servers.

Tony

Sounds great, I have looked into it before but I had never given it any serious thought. I have looked around in the apps FAQ but me get this straight. I can keep the current e-mail address under our domain by signing up with Google apps. Right?

How hard is it to configure? Remember, I am really new to all this mail management stuff.

And Media Temple will probably do it for you when you sign up, if you ask for it. Or talk you through it. You're paying them for this sort of stuff, after all :)

Tony

As far as I remember (I actually did it quite recently), during the signup / setup with Google Apps you are given a special piece of information by Google known as an 'MX' record, which you can copy/paste into an email to your current domain host (probably the same company who looks after your website and email now, but in any case - usually the company you pay for your domain name). Once they add this record to your domain, all emails addressed to anyaddress@yourdomain.com are forwarded to Google Apps, which sorts them into the appropriate Gmail account.

Google provides full instructions for all of this - and the above is actually the most 'complicated' part of the whole process of signing up for any version of Google Apps. In addition to this, in order to verify that you have control of the domain you specify (earlier in the process), Google gives you a simple temporary text file to upload to your website, but everything else is just filling out standard online forms, specifying names and passwords for user accounts etc. Within 24 hours of sign up you can have a completely customised Google Apps setup with working email accounts, docs and calendar.

Yes - one thing you have to watch out for after you have working 'apps' email. You can't (at the moment) simply sign in to standard Gmail (http://mail.google.com) - it won't recognise it, and try to get you to sign up for a personal Gmail account! You need to go to your apps homepage and click 'email', or bookmark the direct url which is of the form http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com. Hopefully one day Google will have one uniform login page for their services...!

Anyway - Google apps is a great deal ... the signup page is at: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index....

Alan.

Thanks a bunch for all this input. I will definitely be looking seriously into Google apps. But as of right now I think it is the way to go.