Using Gmail As Your Business Email
I’ve been using Gmail to handle my business email for the past few years and I’m really happy about the decision. When you use Gmail to handle your business correspondence it doesn’t mean you have an email such as yourbusiness@gmail.com; you can easily use something like yourname@yourdomain.com. The email will come to and go from your personal email, it’s just that you will be using the friendly Gmail interface to manage your email. Some of the benefits of using Gmail as your business email are:
You can set up multiple email accounts for your partners and employees under a common link: http://mail.yourdomain.com, with their own logins and passwords.
You can keep archiving the messages forever, since every email account begins with 6GB of memory that keeps on increasing.
You can either use the web interface, or use an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird to manage emails. I’ve decided to use the web interface as my wife is helping me manage my projects and correspondence and we will be accessing the same email account from different computers.
Setting up Gmail as your business email
It is difficult or easy, depending on how comfortable you are changing your hosting setup. The steps involve (I’m assuming you have a domain hosted somewhere):
Signup at Google Apps and then create the email account (if you don’t create the email account now you may lose your crucial emails once the email start arriving at the new server).
Sign into your hosting account control panel and go to the section where you can manage your email and there, try to find how you can change the MX records. This link has all the procedure explained.
The changes may take up to 48 hours to propagate throughout the Internet and till then you will keep on receiving your email through your current mail server. As soon as your MX records changes are properly propagated, your will be able to go to http://mail.yourdomain.com and manage your email using Gmail.
It may sound a bit doubtful, using a free service for your business email, but it doesn’t make a difference because you will still be using your old email, just with added Gmail features.
