On 19/06/12 11:13, Chris Green wrote:
Well, there's instructions on Google about it, it seems a bit of a drastic way of collecting mail though. Change all the MX records so mail is delivered to google's mail servers instead of the default hosting service ones.
Define "drastic". The point with a Google Apps account is that Google provides your mail server for you, in which case pointing the MX records to them makes sense. What Google is providing here is the equivalent of a hosted mail server, much as I think you are providing/were planning to provide yourself.
If you want to handle email elsewhere and just have it end up in the Google Apps account, Google does provide alternative routes into the mailboxes (primarily for testing the configuration before transferring the MX records but I don't see why they wouldn't work for you). In my case sending mail to mark@<my domain>.test-google-a.com would achieve the same result as sending to mark@<my domain>, except that in the latter case MX records need to be directed to Google whereas in the former case they do not. I'm not sure whether the test-google-a.com suffix is the same for all accounts, but you could certainly try it and see.