setwave

I use Google Apps for Your Domain on a few of my sites. Mainly, to send email through Gmail from my RoR applications. (See my earlier post for help with this.)

Most recently, I discovered a nasty gotcha with using GAFYD a few days back. The basic problem for me started when my application began returning messages like, “The daily quota has been reached,” or something to the effect.

GigaOM has a nice post about the crappiness and general unhappiness his team is starting to feel since switching over to GAFYD. I actually commented on his post which was the inspiration for sharing it here with all my esteemed readers ;)

Well, I don’t share Om’s same sentiments. Partly, because I’m sure the volume of email I send through GAFYD hails in comparison to the great crew over at GigaOM. I do feel that there’s something missing from all the documentation Google provides to sell you on this service, though.

After digging around, I discovered each mail account is limited to 500 emails a days (free accounts) or 2000 a day (premium users). Now, is 500 or even 2000 emails a day fair? I think 500 a day is fair for a free service but I have a problem with a cap of 2000 if I’m a paying customer. This is ridiculous.

I’ve also read Gmail filters potential spam messages by monitoring the number of recipients for each email you send. There seems to be a general acceptance the number of recipients you can send a message to is around 50. So, make sure to avoid adding your entire address book next time compose an email.

In general, this is a good rule of thumb anyway. I can’t fault them for this, just not sharing this anywhere (I can find) in the GMail FAQ’s. One last ‘feature’ are BCC recipients could also raise a flag somewhere in its system. I haven’t confirmed this with them – just reiterating what I happened upon in a google group thread discussing this same topic.

Knowing is half the battle.

I’m sure you’re aware of the recent release of Google App Engine? Yeah, it’s GAE. I signed up and received a free developer account the minute the ‘open for business’ sign went up. I’ve been tinkering with it ever since.

Google App Engine makes prototyping and hosting a spray-and-pray website (you know where you throw some shit(es) at the wall to see if they stick?) super easy. Currently the limitations on the service while they continue to fine-tune the gears and cogs are adequate enough to see if you have a hit on your hands. The integration with the existing Google user-base is worth it to me alone. If this eventually works with OpenID then I’ll take two.

On the other hand, I’m also a little skeptical about giving Google all the keys to your castle. You know? If they managed to rip campfire off to showcase App Engine’s potential, what’s stopping them from taking your code and slapping a beta sticker and ‘g’ in front of the name?

App Engine supports Django templates and form submissions. I’ll let some Django-istas talk about how well this works or doesn’t since this isn’t a framework I’m super familiar with. My Python skills (or lack of) are currently only at best a yellow belt level. I know, I hear you saying, ‘Sweep the leg Johnny! Sweep the leg!’ I’m working up to that part.

One of the first things I’ve started to play around with is adding Rails-style routes. ‘Uh, why don’t you just use Django and be done with it?’ On one hand, I’m not looking to reinvent the wheel but just adding this feature ultimately led to me digging into most of the source code. Can you say link_to(‘home’) in python? I can :)

I even added the ability to ad layouts similar to rails. Actually, I did this as my first little project. But then I found out you could base-class Django-templates. DOH! Oh well.

Now what? I’m not sure yet. Let me know if you’re interested in the routes source and I’ll post it for the 4 spammers who read this blog. Earlier today, I discovered this open source project for porting the major pieces of GAE to the Amazon Cloud. Hilarious! Check it out here.

This is starting to become really interesting. Cloud computing is one area I believe Yahoo! entirely missed the boat on. The rumor-mill also says Microsoft could also be getting into this game, too. I say the more the merrier. All this competition will keep costs down and give me more things to play with.