If you outsource your email to your web hosting company, you definitely should move it to Google instead. If you run your email servers internally, you should at least take a hard look at the Google option.
My views on this are shaped in no small part by a leading independent e-mail analysis firm, Ferris Research. Ferris not only recommended moving to Google, they followed their own advice and moved themselves. Based on their recommendations, I followed suit.
Basic reasons for moving to Google include:
- The price is right (cheap or even free).
- Besides saving hardware, power, space, and software license fee costs, you also should have reduced administrative burdens.
- Google has very solid anti-spam, based on the Postini acquisition. By the way, large scale helps with anti-spam filtering, and obviously few e-mail hosts are bigger than Google. Specifically, scale helps you recognize spam in the most basic way – you see lots of very similar messages show up in a lot of different mailboxes.
- Due to both scale and security technology, Google is much safer against e-mail flood attacks than a typical web host, and even safer than an in-house solution. Since I've been hit with flood attacks twice in the past year and a half, I'm very sensitive to that one. (The goal was apparently to overload and compromise my web servers. The second one succeeded. I'm now at my third hosting company in that period.)
- A performance or security problem elsewhere at a web host can bring down your e-mail. Not so with Google, although its uptime isn't perfect either.
- My own early experiences moving to Google (with a bunch more related links)
- Adam Gaffin's report of a large web hosting company recommending its users move their email to Google
- Some concerns about outsourcing to Google Mail