Earlier this week I had some issues with my email accounts. It's not the first time, and usually the problem is the same... my hosted email account at Siteground.com for koegler.net gets full of trash. Actually, it's the spam filter on the host that gets filled, and the only way I know is that my email account starts bouncing email. I logged into my host and went to clear out the trash and found that it wasn't even close to full. In stead, it seemed that Gmail's POP retrieval function wasn't.

I noticed that a couple of my colleagues were having similar problems, but they cleared up later in the day. That was too late for me. I had already begun migrating my email account to Google Apps. I had considered doing this before, but didn't really want to go through the steps of changing MX records and CName records. Too late now.

I set up a Google Apps account for my company, Revelationship, Inc., and added my email address to it. Then told the account to grab inbound messages from my POP. account. Or wait... should it have been from my Gmail account, that was already pulling from my POP account? I did the POP account first, and all went well. Until I realized that my new Google Apps account was NOT the same as my existing Gmail account.

All my carefully created filters and labels, not to mention my contacts, were still alive in my personal account but nowhere to be seen in my Apps account. I'm not sure why I expected them to magically appear, but it did. Even worse, all the emails in my personal account were NOT in my Apps account.

So, after a moment of "OMG!!!!!" I searched the Labs and found add-ons that would export / import my labels and filters. Then I pointed my Apps account at my personal Gmail account, which began retrieving my 5,000 emails. It took a few hours, but they are now all in my Apps account. 

I shared both my calendar and Docs with the Apps account, and everything is now visible and available. there. I also changed, or actually, added a CNAME to my hosting account at Siteground.com, so that I now have a direct link to my own corporate Google Apps. 

In all it's pretty cool stuff. Between Google Apps and Evernote.com, I don't need to worry about backing up my local data (at least for those apps - I have plenty of other stuff on my drives that does get backed up to multiple locations). i'm sure there's plenty I don't understand about all these facilities, but for now, I've overcome the original problem of having an outage on a server that I'm personally responsible for. It isn't that I don't want to be responsible - just that I'm not all that qualified to do so.

One word about hosting services - I'm thrilled about Siteground's support. I posted 2 separate support tickets today and each of them was responded to and RESOLVED within 10 minutes. And that's on an account I paid $10 for a 1 year plan.

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