Dreamhost, an established web hosting provider, recommended to their clients to consider using Google's webmail interface over their own email offerings. The reason cited was that support requests for email problems constituted the majority of all support calls and messages. The web hosting company will continue to run its own email servers and offer their own service to clients.

In a blog post on DreamHost's blog, co-founder Josh Jones wrote: "Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into 'simple' old email. And that's kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features. Everybody’s just looking at how much disk/bandwidth they get, what version of PHP they run, how good their support is, do they have a funny blog, is their CEO really studly, do the data centers have water beds, and so on… They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free. And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!"

Currently, anyone can use Google Apps (which includes Gmail) with their own domain, for free. All that is required is a simple verification of domain ownership, usually done with uploading a uniquely named HTML file. The free, ad supported edition of Google Apps suite provides access to a number of web application, incluging Google Calendar, Talk, Docs and Sites. The paid edition adds more storage space and features. All versions are hosted on Google network infrastructure.

DreamHost seems to be taking an extra step and making it very easy for their clients to migrate to Gmail. They have added it as an option in their control panels, provided automatic setup of DNS records, and added an API to automatically manage accounts from the client's end.

What does this bode for email? Will hosting companies running Windows Server opt for using Microsoft webmail offerings, and will Yahoo join the fray? What is certain is that cloud-based communication, collaboration and productivity services are rapidly reaching a state of maturity.