GMail

I’ve run into this problem before and it serves are reminder of how anal Google can be at times. Internet at my home as gone down (BT line problem) as a result I have no email as everything was coming into an Exchange box in my attic. I’ve now decided to shift my email over to Google.

The Google Apps for Business (http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html) is an excellent bit of software, it really is. The migration wizard (step by step guide) explained things and provide further information if needed. I’d say within about 5 minutes I was up and running, now this may have been where I went astray. Google only allows a username to be created once (and it ignores . [full stops], so forenamesurname and forename.surname are the same) Having signed in at admin and created 2 new (additional users) I started to look at how much this would cost, a reasonable £2.75 per user per month (if signing up for 12 months [£33]) however Google wants me to pay for 3 accounts! Administrator and my 2 users, so I promptly set about deleting myself and trying to rename the admin, however as I’d already created a user (even though I deleted) I am now unable to sign in with forename.surname@domain, very annoying. What solution do Google offer to this? Adding forename.surname as a nickname (alias) to the admin account, this is just stupid. I tried it and also fiddled around with the reply-to address, but it still always shows as admin@domain

The only possible saving grace in this is that I think the username may become available again after 5 days... it still seems farcical that I only made the username 5 minutes ago but I now have to wait 5 days in order to reclaim it  (very annoying considering I own the domain name)