Ian recently switched over our queerlydigital accounts to Google Apps. Basically, you get GMail, Google Calendar and more for your site/email account. So you get GMail as your web interface, but can also pop or imap your email down to Outlook or the email program of your choice. At first I thought it’d be a hassle with little benefit. But now, I get the benefit of Google’s fantastic spam filter but I get to use my real email address, not do pop via Gmail (which I was doing…then going home and resorting the same emails). I get all my folders/labels in Outlook and Gmail. Right now I do a one way sync with Google’s Outlook Calendar sync to get work appointments to my PDA (poor man’s version of having your phone connect to the Exchange server) on my Gmail account, but I’m going to see if I can switch that to my Google Apps calendar. Then, Ian and I could share our Google calendars to more easily check when both of us are free. Google’s mobile mail site is quite nice, giving me access to my folders as well, which I didn’t have with the default Palm mail app (and I’m too cheap to pay for software!).

The one downside is you can’t just login to Google with your Google Apps for your domain account. To access other Google apps you have to use your Google account. Also, all the widgets out there that interact with Google may or may not work with Google Apps accounts. While there is a Google contacts API, there doesn’t seem to be a good free solution to sync them with Outlook. So, it’s not perfect yet but it’s certainly a lot better than what I had!