Google provides a web based email for free which you can use it for your businesses’ emails. I’m not talking about the standard @gmail.com standard email; I’m talking about @your-domain-name.com type email.
I was surprised to find out that there are still many business owners (especially small business owners) still relies on “the Pond” for their emails, which effectively provides brand name amplification for “the Pond”. For once, use the technology and promote your own domain name! Once again, it’s FREE!
Let’s look at some of the advantage that you can get from it.
- Most obvious one, you don’t have to complain about not being able to change Internet Service Provider because you have to change your email address again! This way, if other companies provide a better deal you can just take them without worrying about changing your email addresses.
- You will have your own satisfaction of using own domain name. It does feel good!
- It provides huge storage for emails. (About 7 GB at the time of writing this).
- Being web based, you can read / write / manage / thrash your emails anywhere. Or if you prefer you can use email clients such as Thunderbird (alright…it works on Outlook too, geez!).
Now let’s see how I use it in my business and day to day emails.
I set up an account with Google Apps, you can also sign up for their premier version if you need more feature, but if you are small then stick with the standard one.
Okay, now let see the applications and gadgets that I use to store the emails:
- Web based Google Apps email. With 7Gb of space, I think it will take a while for it to exhaust, so I set to ‘leave mail on server’ on mail client configuration
- I use Thunderbird to read / write / manage / thrash emails in my Windows
- Again, Thunderbird in my Fedora based Laptop
- Last but not the least, my Blackberry. I don’t really store them in the Blackberry, but for receiving and writing when I am on the go.
Now, with so many devices, I need to set in a way that when I receive mails on my Blackberry during munching my lunch in my local Chinese take away, all mails need to sync with the rest of the devices, otherwise, you will get confused! And this is done automatically (well you do have to click “Get Mail” to receive mails). The big secret of doing this is, when you set up your mail account in mail clients, you put “recent:” in front of the username. So something like, "recent: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ". The “recent:” function will make sure that all new emails will be downloaded regardless if it has been retrieved more than once in another device. The result? I have exact copies of emails in all of my devices, except of course Blackberry will only keep mails for the last 15 days or so.
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