Gmail for Businesses

You don't need a business account to do that. You can add around five pop email addresses to any Gmail account right now. I'm not sure what the added benefits of the business account are though. I just saw the link for that when I logged in earlier today.

Yes that's right you can. That is what I do. It works but sometimes you do still have to check your domain emails because occasionally some emails do get stuck there and don't make their way through. I don't know why. When I say some - I've had issues with a few email verifications and not client/friend ones.

Edit to mention. I use free pop mail on gmail and not business one - sorry I misread your post a little.

I'm using Google Apps for my own business - currently 20 users on it. Though I also know that a client of mine got his company on G. Apps; company having over 500 employees.

The system works just like GMail. But also has great collaboration capabilities. For example, the address book and Google Docs can be shared amongst 'department', 'entire company', 'I select' or 'none'.

Those and countless other handy features that makes Google great, are bundled into Google Apps.

If you don't want to pay for G apps, you can try Mozilla Thunderbird.

I used to do all of the things mentioned in these replies, and they all make sense. Using Gmail for Pop access is a good option. G apps is also decent, but it doesn't get as much priority as gmail does. So when there are updates, it goes to gmail first.

Then, I chose the following option and it worked very well (and is the easiest in my opinion):

In cpanel, create a forwarder from email@yourdomain.com to your gmail account. Then go into your gmail account, go to the "settings" and click on "Accounts and Imports".

When you get there it will give you the option to "send mail as" as many email addresses as you wish. Enter your email@yourdomain.com that you just set up as a forwarder and then select "Reply from the same address the message was sent to".

What this will do is whenever someone send you an email at email@yourdomain.com, it will come to your gmail account. However, when you reply from within gmail as you would normally do, it will be sent as if it's coming from email@yourdomain.com.

That way, you don't have to worry about multiple accounts, because Gmail does it all for you automatically.

Hope that helps!

Dave, you must be running a nice operation! I'm a two man operation, but plan to grow and can see it's benefits from an organization standpoint: sharing of docs, all email addresses can automatically exist, and more.

I'm not sure about the technicalities of POP forwarding or whatever you call it, but it seems different.

In Gmail for Businesses, you setup MX entries on your server. You don't even need an email address there as everything is setup in the apps account. The gmail email for your domain behaves exactly like your normal domain email except you get to use gmail.

I'm going to get this for my business in January.

My hosting provides Free Domains with a hosting account. Google apps account is included free so every domain can be set on Gmail. It works great aside from an auto responder.

If anyone needs it, just send me a pm. Costs about $120 a year with everything. Last I checked the Google Apps account was $500 a year, but this is included.

This is not really true, if you look at the original email, you can see it's from gmail.com, it's just the "From" and "Reply To" headers that are changed

The mail servers still belong to google, so if you look at the original source you can see Gmail's "stamp" on it

Actually you can modify it so gmail's "stamp" doesn't show up. When editing/creating a new account in "Accounts and Imports", the options are "Send through Gmail (easier to set up)" and "Send through [domain] SMTP servers (recommended for professional domains - Learn more)".

If you select the second one and link it to your domain's SMTP server, then gmail's "stamp" is gone because you are not sending it through that server.

At the digital marketing agency I work for, we run all of our Email through Gmail. Gmail offers what is called a platinum plan where your email box gets like 250gig of storage. The other benefit is while we are required to keep some docs in word format on a shared drive, we are saving more docs in google which is much more granular for permissions. Also our defect tracking solution (jira) integrates with google docs.

Anyhow, from my limited vantage, it seems like businesses are taking a chance on google.

That said, I have also done work for fortune 500's who have had us explicitly remove google analytics from all their web properties because they did not trust giving google their traffic and keywords stats... to then turn around and bid on ppc keywords - in these cases the companies mostly moved to omniture for analytics, if anyone is into that kind of stuff.

I just recently found this out also lol. Very cool feature.

You're probably better off setting up your email software to connect to your GMail account via IMAPS rather than POP.

With IMAPS you are making a secure connection between your desktop email software and the GMail servers. Your email data is is encrypted between your computer and the GMail servers.

Since your desktop email software will synchronized to your Gmail account (which may take a while the first time you connect), you will effectively be seeing a mirror image of your GMail Email messages and folders in your desktop email software.

Instructions for setting this up can be found here:

GMail Client IMAP Configuration

I would go with Gmail and IMAP.

That's what I have for about 3 Years now. You have all your Emails lying around on the Google server and you have secure access to them from home, work and vacation. No syncing needed.

When using gmail you have 7.5 GB space available and can add to that if necessary (you have to pay for the extra Space of course). But 7.5 GB for Mails is huge. Currently I´m using only 2.2 GB and that's for 10308 mails. My oldest mail is from January 2005. You have the power to search to all your mails. That is a very nice feature to have. Every piece of information I stumble upon and want to be able to find later, I copy and paste in an email to myself.

For backup of my mails I run a little program every week and generate an offline copy of my mails. This tool is free for Privat Users. It´s called Mailstore Home MailStore - Email archiving solutions and saves your mails to your PC and can also burn the Mails to DVD.

You can use gmail with the google Web interface or it also integrates with Outlook. After using it a few weeks you will be pretty comfortable with the web interface.

Chris

Its a great solution which works well. I already use it and it has worked well for me. Try it out and see how it goes, but check from time to time to make sure certain emails don't get stuck on the way to your inbox.

Switched recently from 3 year use of Desktop Thunderbird, to Gmail. Why?

Because created all possible scenarios of advantages/disadvantages of desktop/online email.

Eg: Search speed, access speed, backup, easy-of-use when traveling, sorting, etc...

Desktop solution (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc...) has many disadvantages.

Gmail has all advantages, no disadvantages.

And this is criteria based upon both corporation and self-employed point of view.

Start using Gmail (and set up your business emails through it).

use it for many of our sites... its been fine.

Using the free gmail account and forwarding emails that way might leave Gmail's stamp on it. I'm pretty sure setting up G Apps with MX entries means it behaves exactly as if it was coming from your domain.

Having desktop email client makes no sense for reasons already mentioned.

I would love to see a WSO of how a few millionaire Warriors setup these often undiscussed parts of their business i.e. bookkeeping, notes, email. Typical discussions don't go further then "Gmail is good." Surely there's some cool, geeky, yet simple stuff being done.

Yeah I never use email solutions from my webhost. On all my domains I have Google Apps (free version) setup. For those who think it's rocket science, well it's very easy to setup. Google has guides on how to change the MX entries.

Email is not the only thing that gets integrated but lots of other apps, which are fantastic for group work and management. You will never use your webhost's email when you taste Google apps.

If you have many domains like me then you can always outsource. There is a guy on Fiverr that does this pretty well and fast for $5. Edit: (I recalled his name is borris)