I’m always surprised whenever I talk with internet entrepreneurs or online business owners and they’ve never heard of Google Apps. To me, it’s an essential part of setting up a business (or new brand) online. To briefly explain, Google Apps is a set of online messaging and collaboration tools. For the purposes of this post, I just want to focus on one of these tools included in Google Apps, Gmail.
By itself, Gmail is a free web-based email service. When utilized within Google Apps it can be customized to control email for your domain. For example, you can setup you@your-domain.com to be controlled through Gmail’s innovative email service instead of through your web host.
What most people do is buy a domain, then buy a hosting account to house their website. Since email is attached to the domain, it’s most common to setup email through the web host. But this commonly results in huge amounts of incoming spam, limited access to email and even deliverability issues.
Here’s What I Like About Gmail
- Web-Based Access – You can access your branded Gmail account securely online anywhere, anytime.
- Mobile Access – Easily integrate your email through your mobile device. No configuring the server for mobile access, it’s already done with Gmail.
- POP3/IMAP – Use either POP3 or IMAP to access your email from your favorite email client. Makes access to your email the same as you’ve always been used to.
- Spam Filtering – Google’s got one of the best spam filters I know of. I’d switch just for this feature alone.
- Email Storage – You get over 7GB of storage. If you don’t know what that means it’s probably 100x more space than most of you will ever need.
- Download From Other Servers – A little known feature is the ability to download email from other email services directly to your Gmail account. No need to setup multiple POP3 accounts in your email client anymore. It can all be available to you through your Gmail account with just one login.
- Price – Well, it’s free. What more can you say.
To get started, click here or just search Google for “Google Apps”. You’ll want to look for the “Standard” edition, which is free. They don’t make this the obvious choice as you can see the graphic below.
Once you get started, just follow the step-by-step instructions.
