For many years I've been an ardent supporter of the "do it yourself" approach for server management. I used to run all of my websites and mail servers from my personal DSL line using a computer in my spare bedroom. Earlier this year, I finally got fed up tending to the hardware and purchases a VPS account at TekTonic. This has served me better than I expected, and I've felt extremely liberated not having to fuss with hardware.
I'm growing increasingly tired, now, of managing my mail services. It's no longer interesting to me to keep up with the latest anti-span tactics, or to restart the mail services when they fail for whatever reason. As such, I'm seriously considering letting someone else manage my email services for me.
I know several people who use -- and rave about -- webmail.us. I'm comfortable paying for someone else' expertise in email management, so I'm willing to fork over a couple bucks a month for a reliable email system I don't need to babysit.
I also see that Google for Domains is available to me, and for free. I'm not entirely keen on the idea of letting Google hold all of my email (plus all my family members' emails), but I'm not so opposed to that idea as to rule out Google altogether.
A quick skim of some of the reviews of Google For Domains suggests that it should be satisfactory for my needs, and will offer a number of additional benefits which may or may not be useful to the family (shared calendar, for example). I think I might give it a shot...
I really enjoy Google for Domains. I don't use the calendar or anything, just the email (and chat to talk to family). The biggest reason I love it so much is great web interface, fantastic spam protection, and enough space to suit all my needs.
I use it for my own email account on caius.name and its just brilliant. I used to just use my .mac account exclusively, and now I'm having a year overlap period where I gradually migrate all my emails across from .mac to my gmail domains account.
So hopefully next year I'll not renew my .mac account, which I've had ever since it was an iTools account back in 1998.
I created an account, but have not yet flipped the switch. I'm impressed by the convenience of the Google for Domains control panel: it's trivially easy to personalize things, and to attach the various services to my own domain name.
My biggest concern is email: I actually don't like GMail very much, because I don't like having all my messages displayed in one gigantic list. I subscribe to the Inbox Zero mindset, and GMail breaks that for me by showing all the mail I've ever received.
Comments I've received suggest that Google's IMAP implementation isn't much better, in that the use of GMail labels as IMAP folders is somewhat awkward; otherwise I'd just stick with Thunderbird and not worry about it. See, I like to file my messages into a few folders, and leave my Inbox with just those items that are, literally, coming in.
I suppose I could cook up some goofy system with GMail filters to apply labels to new incoming messages, and then remove those labels after I've acted upon the message. This would let me simulate a traditional inbox by only viewing items marked "New", but it requires me to do more work to remove the "New" label and apply something else.
I subscribe to the Inbox 250 (TM) mindset. If my work inbox doesn't have at least 250 messages in it, I don't feel the necessary level of stress to feel important. I know I'm feeling very important when the heartburn starts to feel like an old friend. And if the beer at lunch doesn't wash the heartburn down, the tequila at dinner almost always does.
Seriously though, I think I'm going to play with Google for domains. Fortunately, my provider allows me to configure my MX record my self.