Using Gmail for your business

Google (in their plan to take over the world) has one of the best email systems you can find: Gmail.  Their spam filter cannot be beat, and the integration with all of their other apps (online documents, calendars, etc.) is amazing.  Plus - you can store MASSIVE amounts of data on there.  My accounts have around 7GB of storage - and it keeps growing!  I know people who use it as a backup hard drive - just email important docs to themselves. Lots of folks have an @gmail.com email address to take advantage of the above features, but did you know that you can funnel all of your business email through Gmail - for free?  That's exactly what we do here at FPM and what I recommend to all of our clients.

By using Gmail for your business email addresses, you get all of your email accessible from anywhere, it's backed up by the largest datacenter on the planet, and you will almost totally eliminate spam from your life.  Your address still stays as 'yourname@yourcompany.com' - so it still looks nice and professional.  You can stick to using Outlook or Mail.app if you like, or (as I've done) just use the online interface.  (If you're on a Mac, use Fluid to make your email page an app on it's own). If you use the online version to access your email, you can even get rid of the Gmail logo and insert your own, if you feel like it. Take a look at the screenshot of my emails:

To get started, just go to the Google Apps Standard Edition page and sign up. They have pretty good instructions, but you might need to get with your IT folks to get it going right.

So - happy emailing, and good luck!