My current e-mail setup is as follows:

• Mail sent to my 3l.nl mailaccount is received in a pop3 mailbox
• My gmail account is set up to download the mail from the pop3 mailbox periodically
• My father and mother both have 3l.nl mailaddresses, and receive the pop3 mails directly in outlook
• My brother and sister both have 3l.nl mailaddresses, but they’re just aliasses and their mail is directly sent to their gmail or hotmail (yup, some people still use it…) address.

A change of heart

I’m thinking of a new setup using Google Apps. This enables my parents to open their mail directly in a webmail environment (they travel a lot) and on their phone. And everywhere the mail is synchronized (which it is not at the moment).

Also it eliminates the need of an additional gmail address for myself, as it’s unneccessary and my mail arrives delayed, because the pop3 server is pinged periodically (5 minutes, but still).

And last but not least, we’ll be using our awesome 3l.nl e-mail adresses to log in, how cool is that?!

The downside

• All the mail, contacts, calendar and documents I currently have resides in my gmail account. I would like to keep that and move it to the new 3l.nl google apps account.
• My gmail account has analytics access, picasa albums uploaded, etc. All that will have to be setup again using my new 3l.nl google apps account
• The aliasses that I set up for my brother and sister won’t work anymore. I’ll have to create emailadresses for them, and install filters that forward all incoming mail to their own gmail / hotmail address. And that process includes creating and validating forward addresses, etc…

Do you see any solutions to one of my problems? I could also just use e-mail forwarding rules for my parents, and create private gmail accounts for them. But I think this is definitely worth a shot!