Migrating Gmail to Google Apps for Domains

I own a domain name for my family. I have found it to be a fairly good spam protector for my kids, as the spammers don't seem to generate lists of possible account names like they do for major services like Gmail and Yahoo email. Plus, it's nice to have a "vanity email" account that matches your last name. Anyway, I recently migrated the accounts from my domain registrar (GoDaddy; hate the commercials but like the rates) to Google Apps for Domains. This is a great deal - free, 6 GB email accounts, with Gmail spam filtering, at no cost.

The trick for me was to migrate my email from my old gmail account to my new Google Apps for Domains account. I mostly followed the instructions given by Scott Hanselman, but found that using the IP address for the mail server worked for a while, and then stopped. See, the issue is that you can't use pop.gmail.com, because Google Apps balks at pulling emails from this address.

Instead, I did an nslookup on pop.gmail.com, and this is what I got:

C:\>nslookup pop.gmail.com *** Can't find server name for address 192.168.1.2: Non-existent domain *** Default servers are not available Server: UnKnown Address: 192.168.1.2 Non-authoritative answer: Name: gmail-pop.l.google.com Address: 64.233.171.109 Aliases: pop.gmail.com

Notice the Name "gmail-pop.l.google.com". Google Apps for domains accepts this server, and it doesn't seem to "expire" the way the IP address did. It took several days for all my email to migrate over, but eventually it did.