More secure Google Apps for Your Domain
Posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 12:23am. #
I’ve run a mailserver for quite some time, which comes with its good points (nice customised error messages, additional spamassassin, address rewriting) and with its bad points (it falls over occasionally). It also handles a seemingly huge amount of mail - all the mail for @cridland.net (which has around 20 people on it) and all the mail for @mediauk.com. Because I’m fairly free with my address, and because Media UK started life as a domain over ten years ago, I get two or three emails a second, every minute of the day - virtually all of them spam, and virtually all of them dictionary attacks.
Even before leaving CIX, I had started using the bullet-proof email from spamcop.net: coming complete with a (rather hacked) version of Horde webmail and a decent IMAP account. It was quite a passable webmail system, but I found myself oscillating between webmail and mail on something like Outlook Express for some time. I think I finally stopped using Outlook when the first Outlook worms came out.
On 14 June 2004, I joined Gmail; and very quickly realised that this was better than the email software I was using. (I know this because Gmail’s still kept that first message). Fairly quickly, I pointed my @cridland.net email address, and Media UK’s, to Gmail instead - particularly when they allowed you to “send as” a different email address.
Earlier this year, I left Gmail; and moved over to Google Apps for My Domain. After a lot of looking and prodding, I’ve managed to configure it so that my own @cridland email comes to Google, while everything else passes through quite comfortably to my own mailserver. It also migrated all my old mail over from the old gmail.com to my new @cridland.net address, so searches still find my old emails. It’s all working splendidly. It’s the premium product, so I’m paying £25 a year for this privilege; and it’s all working pretty well so far, bar a few initial hitches.
Anyway, the point of this message was just to point out that, just like Gmail, you can change the “http” at the front of the address to “https”, and it makes everything nice and secure for you. “https” encrypts your web traffic so that even your IT people can’t snoop into your own email.
Life is slightly different in GAFYD. Yes, you get a secure interface in exactly the same way, but Google also gives you a user-configurable domain like http://webmail.cridland.net/ which you can’t simply change to start “https” instead. After a few days’ scratching heads, I’ve discovered a simple and magic solution: host “webmail.cridland.net” myself and, through one line of PHP, point my browser to the https:// version. Excellent, that works nicely.
PS: An unintended but quite useful benefit of Google Apps is that I can now use my real email address on Google Talk. So, for those of you with my @gmail address in Google Talk or Jabber, feel free to delete it and put instead my proper email address, which is my first name @cridland.net.
Photo: kk+ from Vancouver fashion and portrait photography. Used under licence.
Nick said at March 24th, 2008 at 8:22pm 
