Ever since Gmail was released, I've been and avid user. Lots of space, slick interface, yada yada. You know the drill. However, I've had the dustyd.net domain for sometime, and my "permanent" email address has always been dusty AT dustyd.net. I've never wanted to be tied to a particular service (Gmail, Hotmail, etc).
To this end, I've got everything sent to the dustyd.net domain forwarding to my Gmail account. Gmail then let's you pretend like I'm sending from my dustyd.net address. Hard to explain, yes, but really pretty straight forward.
Problem is, Gmail doesn't exactly allow you to handle this transparently.. Instead of sending from the dustyd.net account, it sends the message "On Behalf Of me", which is crap. I still get people sending messages to my Gmail account. Bleh.
So today I switched my MX records to point to Gmail for your domain. Essentially, google now handles all of my dusytd.net email, natively. No forwarding required!
One issue though, there's no way to import all of my OLD messages. You'd think I'd be able to just convert my old account to a hosted account or something, but no. I even went so far as to send a message to the fine google folks, and here's the response..
Hello Dusty,
Thanks for your message. While Gmail for your domain doesn't currently support the functionality you've requested, we are testing many new things.
We'll forward your feature request to the appropriate team. We appreciate hearing from our users, and value all of the help you offer while we improve Gmail for your domain during this beta test.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
Nice enough, but that was way back in March. Bleh. Oh well, time to start over. I guess I still have access to all of my old emails & contacts. It's not like I'm really loosing anything.
So from now on, my one and only email address is:
dusty AT dustyd.net