So, the last dedicated server was a steaming pile of poo run by a company that didn’t have their own NOC monkeys to do things like change a network cable, fix their routers, or perform emergency power cycles…

Moved to another place, and managed to relocate all the data through the magic of rsync. Even managed to move the monster database behind this site over without a hitch. Lovely.

Part of the move involved weighing the pros and cons of running my own mail server again. I can do it, but it’s a bit of a pain with domain names like foo.ca which seems to attract an awful lot of spam and bounce spam.

Enter Google Applications which offers a free portal of sorts and allows customized domains; a little bit of work in changing my dns entries, and Google’s doing all my email. Well, there’s a hold out domain, but that was my own damn fault, and it should fix itself shortly.

I can setup 100 email addresses under foo.ca, and due to the way google apps is setup, those people also get aliases to all the other domains I have on the account;

• bukkake-burger.com
• heilxenu.org
• raytu.be
• skepticaldog.com
• snfu.ca
• withguests.ca

I can’t explain some of them adequately to not sound insane, but they sounded like really funny ideas at the time I registered them, so if you want to be manager@bukkake-burger.com or cathode@raytu.be or tom@heilxenu.org you could be. Is such a privilege worth a one-time fee to help pay my domain name registrar bills? Email addresses by donation…

Along with the excellent name, you get a full gmail account that you can use on its own or you can set it to forward everything to another account.