Last year I moved my main email address from a generic Gmail account to my own domain. The reasons were many, but the main gist of it is so that I will control my email no matter what happens with a service provider.
In the past I had signed up for my first email account with Yahoo, then Hotmail, then finally Gmail. Having my email under my own domain name allows me to switch providers for whatever reason while still using the same address. It also gives me more control, which I am a fan of when it comes to my online life.
However, I moved to Google Apps instead and that created a number of problems for me.
- ANOTHER Google account of some sort … which included work, my Gmail account, my business, and then my personal one
- Google having access to my personal email, which wasn’t a problem for my conscience in the past, but was becoming more of one
- Google’s mail is not your generic IMAP account with folders, they do a lot of other stuff
- Google has begun limiting Apps accounts and might do so again in the future
Now, the Google Apps service is still superb, and as I have said before, it is good enough that I think it has killed a good portion of the hosted email business, but I still wanted to move to something else.
Well, for now, that “something else” is Atmail Cloud. As of earlier this evening, both my business and personal email (along with This One Podcast) is now going through Atmail Cloud. They have been wonderful so far and are still working out some kinks in the whole thing, but their support has been superb. I’ll write up more about Atmail Cloud later.
So I no longer have a personal or business Google Apps account and this has simplified things nicely. Now I can enjoy Google’s services without thinking about which account I should be using. I now have only one (my old Gmail account) … and that mail is already forwarded to me.