If you run into an error that says:

This service is not available

Gmail is not available for yesmyown.com. Learn more about Google products you can use with your-google-apps-account@yesmyown.com.

Did you use this product with a different Google Account? Sign out of your current Google Account and then sign in to the account you want.

Step 1

The typical solution is to make sure that Gmail is enabled under the Organization & Users Menu and under the submenu “services” … you can access this screen directly if you are now logged into your Google Apps account by modifying this URL:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yesmyown.com/Organization#Organization/subtab=1

If you decide to make changes here, don’t forget to save them.

Step 2

The typical solution may not solve a niche problem that happens when you add several domain aliases to the primary google apps account and you haven’t clicked through the “yes I set up my MX records” validation process. If you added more than one domain to your account, you may also want to check under Domain Settings -> Domain Names:

https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/yesmyown.com/DomainSettingsDomains

Make sure that you aren’t missing anything in the domain validation process. You may need to set MX records for alias domains that aren’t the primary domain before you can access Gmail.

Once you have validated everything here, go back to the menu from Step one and disable Gmail, save changes, then re-enable it and save again. Don’t forget to re-enable it, because you will lose email if you leave it disabled for more than 30 days.

See Also:
Google’s Troubleshooting tips
Other reasons service may be unavailable in Google Apps

This morning I was bombarded with about 4,000 spam messages. All of these spam messages were relayed through Google Groups. Fortunately, Gmail has an excellent filtering and labelling system that made it easy to report all of these messages as spam very quickly. Here’s how you can fight thousands of spam messages in just a few minutes using your Gmail account:

Step 1
Open a spam message (any spam will do) and click the “show details” link.

Step 2
Click “filter messages from this mailing list”.

Step 3
Go to the “Has the words” box, and change it to listid:.googlegroups.com>". This will tell gmail to match the pattern .googlegroups.com in the listid header.

It should look like this when you’re done. Click the “Next Step” button.

Step 4
Create a new label for google groups. You can call it “google groups”

Step 5
Check the “Skip the Inbox” if you don’t want to see this spam in your inbox.
Be sure that “Apply this label” is checked.
Check the “Also apply this filter…” box so that the filter retroactively works with existing messages.
Click “Create this filter” and you should see all the spam moved from your inbox to your “google groups” label.

Step 6
Here’s how to report the spam:
Navigate to your “google groups” label (there’s a link to it on your left sidebar).
Click “Select All.”
Now just make sure it’s all spam and report it.

You can also select more than one page at a time, but Gmail won’t let you report multiple pages as spam. You can, however, delete multiple pages of email.