How to migrate from Gmail to Google Apps for free and take your messages with you

You've got your custom ride, your modded laptop, and enough piercings to put airport security on amber alert. So why languish in the grey-faced uniformity of a gmail.com email address? Time to move to Google Apps and finally do something with that domain name you bought in 2001 when you thought your band really might be going somewhere.

Gmail is a powerful online email beast that's replaced our desktop email clients thanks to its huge storage, smartly threaded conversations and availability on any computer connected to the Infobahn.

Before Google Apps came along, you could already use Gmail with your own domain, but it was a hack job. You could forward email from your domain -- nate@disturbingpetcamerashots.com, for example -- or get Gmail to pick it up automatically via POP3. Then you could set Gmail to send email on behalf of your domain address, but the fact that you're really using Gmail is always visible in your email headers. It looks slightly amateurish, and confuses our idiot friends who end up replying to the Gmail address rather than to our domain.

But now you can have your own little corner of Google's mail servers, with no need to forward or mask where things are coming from. And it's free! With our help, you can make sure that the 56,000 emails you already have in Gmail can be safely migrated over to your new Google Apps accounts like a herd of well-behaved buffalo.

The free, standard version of Google Apps offers the same amount of storage as Gmail -- 7GB -- but there's a limit of 100 email mailboxes. And since Google Apps is supposed to be more stable, not every new feature in Gmail is rolled out to it right away by default, although you can change this in the domain settings.

You can get lots more help on each step online, but this overview of the whole process will keep your email from ending up in the great trash bin in the sky. Go grab your domain from one of the millions of domain-name registrars, dust off your nerd hat, and join us on a magical journey of MX records. Click Continue to see where to start.