I have read that there is an option of using Gmail as your primary mail server. In the sense that you can add mx records etc and you do not have to do it on your own server.
Do you think this is a recommended setup in terms of security. Will Gmail do the fight against virusses, spam, and brute force attacks for you?
[UPDATE]
I have seen that this post has some attention by a couple of people. I must say that right after this post I switched my whole communication system to Google. With communication being email, calendar, documents, etc. I must say that this is in my opinion the best step we made.
[switching webhosts]
We were a starting company, and I had to switch webhosts and servers a lot due to configuration/price/etc. with every switch I had to set over all the websites, and also every time the email adresses, and always losing the emails that were on the other server. With having your email 'in the cloud'. Your emails are always at one place, and you just have to set over the websites when switching hosting providers.
[server security]
Another big issue was the security. We had to move over to a dedicated, with more power. With the greater power came greater complexity. I had to work with linux now, and build my own solid server, with great protection to the outside world. I had to say I was amazed by the numbers of attacks we got each day. Being brute force hacks, sniffing etc. After months of work I had finally build a somewhat 'safe' system. The only weak point in my opinion was the email system. Getting a good spam protection, and I had no idea what kind of risks there are more. This is a thing of the past now, as all the email of the company is safely delivered and protected against spam.
[server performance]
Another small benefit is the resources used by the email programs. I don't have any spam protection or antivirus running on the machines now, this has to be a small benefit.
[conclussion]
Finally the service is great. There are a lot of synchronisation options, also for mobile devices. Being a small company this would be hard for us to set up on our primary server, so having this all work from the cloud is a great thing.
I host some of my personal email there (not like "I have a gmail account" but actual domain email hosted there).
On the one hand, they're pretty reliable, and they're not likely to get taken down by any shmuck with a grudge against your company. You get a lot for free, and if you want more, it's pretty cheap. They do do decent spam filtering, and probably viruses as well, though I haven't even SEEN an email virus in so long, I've forgotten what they look like.
On the other hand, there have been a few significant outages lately. You have to decide for yourself as far as reliability goes. I wouldn't do it with professional mail, but I have the resources to pay for services like Postini (owned by google) and pay for security appliances, SAV gateways, etc, etc, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Edit: Sorry. Enterprisey, large business: shouldn't have said "Professional" because you can have a professional setup in any size shop.
I run mail servers for about a thousand people, I deal with a large volume of emailed image files, a decently large amount of encrypted email, and I run mail proxies, mail forwarders, dedicated antivirus gateways, multiple exchange servers, SAN mail stores big honking security appliances, and, above that, Postini.
My point is that, for what I need, I pretty much have to host it in house. If your needs are complex enough, you may have to as well.
We use it here, and I really like it. I just don't have to think about e-mail anymore — I can't think of any higher praise than that. That said, the switch was made before I started here, and so I have none of the political pressure that comes from such a move and didn't have to deal with any of the conversion issues.
Here is what I found:
That said, I want to mention again that we really like it here. The service itself is probably more stable than our own e-mail server would be, and it's definitely going to work better off-premises. The spam and virus filtering are probably better than we could do on our own as well. All in all, it's a very low-cost way to provide a quality e-mail account for our students and staff (we're a small college).
My opinion is that gmail is a great fit here in part because it's what our students are used to (they prefer this to pop/imap system requiring Outlook/Outlook Express/Thunderbird and gmail's web interface is top notch), it serves all the students well (even exchange students) over the breaks, it works well for our recruiters and coaches when they're away, and does it for much less money and with much less maintenance than we could do it ourselves.
On the other hand, before most business can adopt it they need to provide a working notification application and fix the compliance delete button issue. Also, as a school we get the service for next to nothing, but for-profit business pays something like $50 per user per year. The stories I hear indicate the migration tools need some work as well.
Update
I had to go back through some of the docs from when we set this up, and I found this link:
https://www.google.com/support/hosted/bin/answer.py?answer=139019
from which I quote:
The same section also talks about a for-pay add-on (no doubt based on Postini) called Google Message Security and Compliance you can buy that deals with the compliance and archiving issues I mentioned, but it's $45/user/year.
afaik they do basic scanning, but they have also an additional ($$$) service called POSTINI (they've bought it some years ago).
Btw I wont use google for an enterprise.. (i've done it in the past just for some months and it was a pain in the ... to migrate from)
I have a small business client that uses Gmail. They just love it. POSTINI ($50 per user per year) with very good spam filter gives them ability to retrieve messages they inadvertently deleted. And now they have Droid with Androids. It integrates very well with their phone and they feel like they have an private email server backed by big IT resources. Google calendar sends you SMS/Email for notification; people can see the busy/free hours each other. Also, Google talk has very clean interface and lets you do IMs(of which you can save).
GMail now has IMAP support for public users for free. This happened recently and I LOVE it. I like keeping my mail up on the server instead of on my machine and using Thunderbird to check it. Works beautifully.
So, in that respect, I would highly recommend using GMail unless you think you could also setup a encrypted TLS IMAP server of your own. That is the bar that GMail has set and in order to justify some other solution you need to beat that.