Carson Gee

Over the 4th of July weekend I finally broke down and decided to migrate off of my own mail server and over to Google Apps.  Between the space, SPAM filtering, Android syncing, reliability, and cost, I couldn’t justify running my own mail services anymore.  It has been a great run for the last 10 years or so, but I doubt I’ll miss it.  That being said, here is a bit of a sysadmin journal of the migration, in case this ends up helping anyone, or more importantly myself, in the future.

Account Creation

Account creation with the free Google Apps was simple, and using the setup wizard worked well.  It covered all the basics.  I decided to do domain verification using their Web page validation on the domain.  I had to do a little URL witchcraft to redirect the URL they wanted to my static media Web server, but thankfully their verification tool follows redirects.  Otherwise it could have been a bit of a nightmare.

I should note that I bought a new domain to ease with the transition, and to marry all of my domains into a single Apps account.  That made forwarding all of my existing mail to the new account very simple.  On my existing mail exchanger, I just added forwards into my /etc/aliases file (using postfix).  So they looked something like:

root: x
x: carson, carson@newdomain.com

for all my mail accounts.  This gave me some nice lead time to copy all the old mail over to the new accounts and wait for DNS caches to expire on the old MX records.

Data Migration

To actually copy the old mail to the new Google accounts I used Google App Migration for Microsoft Outlook.  With Outlook hooked up to my Zarafa account using the Zarafa Client, I was able to easily and cleanly migrate mail, calendars, and contacts without any difficulty.  That being said, I only had a few user accounts to migrate, so I instructed them how to migrate themselves using said tool.  If this was a larger mail deployment, I understand that Google has better mass migration tools that are available with the non-free version of Google Apps-Apps for Business, or Apps for Education.

It did take forever to copy my 10 plus years of e-mail (about 1GiB and about four hours), but I blame that on the tiny trickle that is my DSL upload speed; not so much on my old server, the migration tool, or the Google Apps servers. It is however something to be aware of for your clients, since they are likely to also have abysmal upstream pipes.

Post Transition

After adding all of my domains as domain aliases (the free account allows for as many aliases as you want, but does not allow you to do full domains/accounts with the free Apps version) and injecting all the required MX records, all of the domains were fully transitioned with all e-mail going to the right place and my old server able to be decommissioned within about 24 hours.  Everything seemed great, but there are a few slight snags I ran into after the transition.

The real big problem was that Google App accounts are missing certain parts that regular Google accounts have.  Most importantly at the moment would be Profiles.  Another source of strife was that for some reason iGoogle is disabled by default for Apps accounts.  So while I couldn’t fix profiles, I was able to fix iGoogle at least.  This brought up the two ways I see of how to migrate from having an existing Google account to your new Apps account.  The way I chose to migrate was simply not too, and just enable multiple sign ins.  This seems to be easy and allows me to use GMail, Reader, and Google+ without much fuss.  Another of my user’s chose to just migrate all of her old Google account settings (Reader feeds, iGoogle widgets, etc.).  Unfortunately that is a road to pain and I simply can’t suggest it as viable until there is better synchronicity between App accounts and regular accounts.