As part of their website redesign, YUSU have added Google Apps support to give each club and society a nice big Gmail account. Like a lot of societies, after some deliberation we decided to make the move from our old York socs account.

Things have been largely positive, but there are a few gotchas we’ve come up against so far. I’m going to provide a quick setup guide and then outline these issues so you hopefully don’t have to follow the same (occasionally torturous) path we did.

Should I switch to Gmail?

Advantages:

• Much more space (4GB vs. 50MB)
• Emails not eaten by MessageLabs – MessageLabs is the spam solution used on the York email accounts. Although effective, it does sometimes delay (by hours or days) a significant number of legitimate messages, or occasionally doesn’t deliver them at all.
• The web access interface is much nicer than the York one

Disadvantages:

• Spam protection not quite as good – We get about 200 spam messages per day through to Breakz. Almost all are filtered out, but Gmail seems slightly worse than MessageLabs was.
• Unclear about the TOS / SLA / privacy (though this is largely true for the York solution too)
• Getting mail out of Gmail if you or YUSU decide to move to another system at some point (this can be overcome with POP / IMAP – see below)

So it seems like a good thing to do.

Setting it all up

Log in to Gmail. Change your name in the settings bit (top right).

Go to the York email settings page (use your socs account to log in) and set the account to forward to your new YUSU address (”please divert my mail to”).

Anything else?

If you’re just planning on sending a few messages and only using the Gmail web interface then you’re done. Pat yourself on the back and go and have a coffee or something. Go on, shoo!

Otherwise, please read on…

Using your own domain

For a number of years, we’ve used info@breakzdjs.com as our public-facing address. Until recently, this just forwarded to our socs account. We’ve now changed this so it goes to the Gmail one instead.

As well as looking more professional, this solution means we can move the actual location of our email around (as we have just done) without changing our contact details. If you’d like to do something similar, your host’s control panel should have email forwarding options.

If you do this and use the Gmail web interface, you should set up a reply-to address in the Gmail settings so mail doesn’t appear to return to your YUSU account. You should also do this in your mail client if you’re using the Gmail SMTP server (see next) as Gmail will helpfully change the from address to your @yusu.org one.

Accessing Gmail through an email client

If you’d rather read your mail with Outlook or Thunderbird (and I have no idea why you wouldn’t want to), Gmail supports both POP and IMAP access. You can enable both via the web interface’s settings bit (Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab).

Google’s implementation of POP is non-standard, as it tries to sync your web and local inboxes. This works fine with just one person reading the mail, but breaks if (as is likely) more than one person is accessing the account via POP. The first person gets messages delivered as expected, but subsequent people will get nothing. Clearly, this is shit. (It also breaks if you read the mail on more than one computer.)

A much better choice is Gmail’s recently released IMAP option (as used by York for the past 10+ years). At the moment, to get IMAP to show up, you have to set the interface language to ‘English (US)’.

Update: The way Gmail does IMAP is non-standard too. In particular, deleting a message from the inbox does not, actually, delete it. There’s a list of how IMAP and Gmail actions sync here.

Google guides:

• How to set up POP access
• How to set up IMAP access

Sending to large mailing lists

Gmail places quite tight restrictions on the number of emails you can send per day. It’s only possible to email 500 people per day from the web interface, and just 100 via Google’s SMTP server. If, like us, you have over 500 people on your mailing list, this is clearly useless.

There are two principal ways round this:

• Use a list management service
• Use a different email server

Using a list management service

The university provides a mailing list service that quite a few societies already use. There’s info on the site about how to apply for one.

You could also consider the YUSU mailing / membership list service (part of the new website - log in as your society to access), though when I tried it briefly it appeared to be rather unfriendly and somewhat broken.

We don’t use either of these options as we want to be able to record more information about our members (e.g. whether they are interested in DJ lessons), occasionally need to email specific groups (newly registered, DJs, etc.) and want to allow people to join the list via our site.

Using a different email server

If you’re on campus, you can get round this by using the York SMTP server. Get rid of the Gmail outgoing server settings (don’t forget to reset the authentication to default) and enter smtp.york.ac.uk instead.

If you’re off campus, you may be able to use your ISP’s server (check with your ISP for settings). However, quite a few ISPs are even stricter than Gmail on sending email. If you’re with one of them, you can use the York SMTP server once you’ve connected to the university web cache or VPN. (You may also be able to use your department’s email server and VPN instead.) Unfortunately this means you’ll have to connect to the VPN each time you want to send an email to your mailing list.

Think that’s it! Hope that helps – otherwise, post a comment or get in touch.