Computer support and website design in the French Alps

If you are using Microsoft Small Business Server then Google Apps for your domain is a great additional solution for offsite archiving of all mail as well as spam control and mail queuing while your server is offline.

However the built in POP3 connector in SBS is very basic and doesnt support alternative ports or SSL which Google force you to use.

To get around this you need to grab hold of Stunnel and OpenSSL

Install both programs and copy the dll’s from “program files\gnuwin32\bin” to windows\system32

Then edit stunnel.conf to include the following

client=yes
service=gmail
[gmail]
accept=127.0.0.1:110
connect=pop.gmail.com:995

Now in your pop connector settings use 127.0.0.1 as the Email server for your Google Apps accounts

I started having problems looking at my Gmail and my Google Apps for your domain mail in firefox recently,Google kept saying “We’re sorry. It seems there is a problem. Please try using Gmail with a supported browser.”

fter a bit of research I have determined that it is due to to the User-Agent header in firefox having changed and Google not having updated their code to take account of this. I have two solutions that you can use.

1. disable the browser checking by appending ?nobrowsercheck to the url, so for gmail type in
   http://mail.google.com/mail/?nocheckbrowser
   and for google apps for your domain type in
   http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/?nocheckbrowser
   obviously replacing the domain with your own.
2. edit the browser agent string in firefox to something older, so in the address box type in
   about:config
   and then scroll down to general.useragent.extra.firefox
   and double click on it and change it to Mozilla Gecko Firefox/1.5.0.4

I prefer the first solution, but either work.

This is some of the best news that has happened in ages.
is a great system for managing your email, but up until now it has not been possible to use IMAP.

The introduction of IMAP means that the same mailbox can be accessed by different users on different computers and changes are kept in sync. For small office setups and small businesses run from home this is ideal.


gives you a fully functioning mail system with fantastic anti spam and antivirus control. You can also keep documents, spreadsheets and presentations online and accessible from anywhere. You also have on online calendaring application which sends reminders to your mobile phone via sms as well as to your email. And all of it is written so that it works on most modern mobile phones with internet browsing capabilities.

I have been using it with the POP version of collecting my email for some time now, and have set this up for some of my clients, I have been hesitant to push it though because of the lack of IMAP support, but now that this is part of the package then it is on my highly recommended list.

If you want more advice on the advantages then don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you want help setting it up then please do get in touch. I was going to put some instructions here but there are already good ones at LifeHacker and at HowToGeek