Ok, first the news… I'm now a part of the Google domain email beta testing program. (https://www.google.com/hosted/)

It all began, thanks to GoogleWatchers - I think there's a need to coin a term here. GoogleWatchers are those Google aficionados who watch every move the Mountain View -based company makes. Whenever there's a public service launch or a beta group is invited to participate in one of Google's programs, these GoogleWatchers are there.

When the Google domain email hosting service was launched, it was splashed across many GoogleWatcher's blogs. Since I was involved in maintaining a domain, I thought about giving it a shot. Actually, I was already using a customized version of Google-for-your-domain-email. I've redirected all the emails I've created to individual gmail accounts and activated the 'send mail as' feature (that's tucked under Settings>Accounts). Thus, when an email is sent to an @domain address, it first goes to the hosting server. The email forwarder there sends the mail to a gmail account. When someone needs to reply to this email, it would seem coming from the domain email address and not someone@gmail.com. This completes the cycle of email communication. There is only one thing I need to regularly take care of - manually clearing the mails from my hosted server. A copy of all emails is stored on the Domain space and needs clearing manually - probably this is a hosting service limitation.

So, when I start using the gmail hosted email solution, first, I'd have 1 GB space for all my users. Second, no more manual clearing of mails would be required (search, don't sort :). And, the Google dashboard interface is a lot slicker that the cranky one offered by my hosting provider.

For activities like managing domain emails, convenience is the mantra. And Google seems to know it well! What do we have next… Web hosting? (http://pages.google.com)