Home Of Tong

I have been using roundcube to access my HomeOfTong.com email for quite a while now. The reason I use roundcube is because I needed something web-based, so that I can access my email anytime, anywhere. I kinda dislike Horde and SquirrelMail, 2 commonly used webmail interface offered by most web hosting company. I somehow feel that those 2 doesn’t give me what I want. Roundcube is different, it is simple and easy to use. The interface looks good and the functions are great. The only setback is that it is still in Release Candidate stage, but it should be not far from full launch.

Roundcube is now offered in BlueWhaleHost.com as a standard webmail interface and if you have not tried it before, I recommend you to give it a try. There are also many ‘non-official’ version that others have improved without going through the official channel. Through Roundcube, mails are store in IMAP format which you can also download and keep a copy in say Outlook, without affecting any emails, thus it can be used as your backup.

But I recently discovered Google Apps, and oh boy, it is indeed a fantastic discovery for me, and I hate myself for not trying it out earlier. Google Apps is a cluster of applications that Google has developed that is free for all to use. Mail is of course one of them, along with Spreadsheet and Docs, Calendar and Web page. The mail is the same familiar interface with GMAIL with the exception that it is now under your own domain. So you get to use your own domain, and combine with the best of GMAIL (which have excellent SPAM filter), all for FREE! Of course, there are some additional feature and functions if you sign up for the Premier edition at USD50/year/account. One of which is the email migration tools, which is available only to paying users. If you are a free user, you have to forget about all your previous mail, keeping it in archive in whatever format it is now in. But since it’s free, I don’t mind it at all, just have to learn to live without the old emails. With Google not likely to go anywhere, you can be assured that the email stays intact.

I have yet to try out the other apps but the email apps is the one I like most. Porting over to Google is easy and fast if you are able to control your own MX and CNAME records (the latter is not really necessary in my way of using it). Or if you are setting up a new domain, do it with Google and save all the trouble. Or you can just sign up with BlueWhaleHost.com for a new domain at just USD5 for the 1st year. If you don’t have much email, this is the best time to migrate to Google, and if you require services to move your current email, you can always contact me at kelvin@homeoftong.com and I will be please to help you with minimum charges, complete with a personalized logo.

So thanks to Google, I now have a much more reliable and user-friendly interface for my email.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under Computer and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.