email and your startup
September 27th, 2007
This is the second part of my series on scaling a startup with minimal resources. Last time, I talked about monitoring your services using pingdom. Today, I’ll be talking about email.
Email is still a killer app. We use it all the time. Nobody in the office noticed that the the blog and website were down for the weekend. (Thanks guys!) If our email had gone down for the weekend, people would definitely have been banging on my door and calling my phone to tell me that we have a problem. It’s Just That Important(tm). Do you know anybody with a CrackBerry BlackBerry? Why do you think they call it that?
When we first got started, we just used whatever email addresses we already had set up. That lasted for about a month or so, then we decided that this was just bad branding. We needed to look a little more organized. So, the next step was setting up a mail server for us. I just used Courier IMAP and Postfix to get us a good setup. The problem was that I was now responsible for keeping the mail up and running…not exactly my cup of tea. I also had to start worrying about things like open relays, spam and virus filtering, helping people configure mail clients, even the security policies of the Syracuse University network (where our main office is located). Arggg! I just want to write code. So, I started looking for a way to offload this responsibility.
I found two viable solutions, Google Apps or Webmail.us, either of which could offer us the two things that I thought we needed – email and a good web interface. In the end, it was Google. It’s free, I can set up a CNAME so that mail.wgrids.com points to the webmail, it integrates with Google documents, and (MOST IMPORTANTLY!!) people were already familiar with how to use it because we all already had Gmail accounts. Perfect!
Of course, GMail has gone down a couple of times. It’s a major operation, I would expect it to do that once in a while. The difference is, when our email goes down these days, I just write code and eventually it comes back online.
Summary- Total cost for Google hosted email: $0
- Total worry about email: 0
- Total code written since the switch: thousands of lines
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