One of the first things I ask a company when they come to me for consulting is, who handles your email? Approximately 7 out of 10 say GoDaddy, NetworkSolutions, or one of the other domain registries. This baffles me, time and time again. It’s astonishing that a company/corporation would settle for some type of web based email, let alone one that they have to pay for!
A little unknown service offered by Google, is called Google Apps. In Google Apps there is an email program, that allows you to use your company URL but receive emails through gmail. I use it for every single one of my websites currently. Setting up the app to work with your company URL is simple and should take you less then 5 minutes to complete. With a simple change of the MX information you are almost done. Although there is a verification process, to validate that the URL is, in fact yours, you usually can have the email up and running within the hour.
Since there are too many amazing features to highlight during this article, I will only focus on a few of them. Google Apps lets you set up to 100 different email accounts for free. Each one of these email in-boxes contains 25GB of storage. Creating a new email name for a friend or employee is a breeze, and is done by entering their Name and Email address.
Included in the app are the regular features of Gmail, such as archiving, and spam protection. To access your new Gmail app email account, you would go to a link similar to this http://mail.google.com/a/yoursitename.com. If you do not like this way you can also set it up to be http://mail.yoursitename.com. This is totally up to your preference. Once again, did I mention this is free?!
After recommending this service to every single one of my clients, it is safe to say not one will ever go back to using regular web based paid for email services. If you have any questions regarding this, I would be happy to help you set it up. Just leave me a comment.
