Google Mail for Your Domain has launched in it’s early beta stages, I had a couple of invites for it (one of them being for JustMac, but that’s not of that much use to me since JustMac.co.uk now goes somewhere else of course!) however I’ve been experimenting with the service and I’m impressed…

When you first sign up you create an admin account (they encourage you to take something like admin@yourdomain but in practice it can be anything), this leads you to the “Dashboard” which will have a big yellow warning on it about your MX records being wrong!

The first thing I noticed (other than the MX warning) is my account type is “Free” (Free Account - Up to 25 users) which gives some indication that there will always be a “free” level of your own domain GMail service, and if you want more than 25 users you’ll have to pay Google some money… seems reasonable enough to me.

You can create users, change or reset their passwords, and view when the last signed in and how much of their 2GB quota is remaining from this dashboard. It’s worth noting that you cannot create users “abuse” or “postmaster” as Google monitors those accounts to address abuse reports. You can, however, get a copy of anything sent to them.

You can also create “email lists” these special addresses can go to multiple other users of your domain. They cannot, however, go to any eMail address outside of your domain name.

There’s a few other little perks, you can change the colour of the sign in box that your users see (nothing else…. just the colour of the box :P), you can also use your own “fancy logo” to replace the Google Mail one in the corner of the pages your users see and you can enable and disable Jabber chat for your users.

Other than those cosmetic changes, the interface your users see is identical to the standard GMail interface but with some references to GMail replaced with the name of your organisation.

The jabber chat function is also really nice, this enables your users to use ANY Jabber client with their them@yourdomain.com account … although it does require the addition of a few SRV records to your DNS.

GMail for Your Domain would probably be well suited to most small businesses, and as it handles both eMail and Calendar needs it could easily completely replace systems like Outlook used in most offices. All we need now is GoogleTalk to gain some sort of VoIP implementation and Google can probably just about provide all of your communication needs (although I doubt they’d stoop to GoogleFax as it’s supporting a basically dead format, but it would be nice to have your fax number linked directly to your GMail inbox!)

All in all it’s an impressive beta that, like most things Google produces, will become an impressive product.

p.s. Google Calendar is available to all your domain users too.