Using Gmail As Your Business Email

Apr 23, 2008

For a few days I’ve been using Gmail to handle my business email 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.

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6 Responses to “Using Gmail As Your Business Email”

Web Hosting » Using Gmail As Your Business Email
April 23rd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
[…] Content Writing and CopyWriting Blog wrote an interesting post today on Using Gmail As Your Business EmailHere’s a quick excerpt For a few days I’ve been using Gmail to handle my business email 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 […]
Lance Winslow
April 23rd, 2008 at 5:09 pm
My personal observations may not be appropos to all, in fact it might be against the new mindset, however let me explain my position. I believe if someone has a FREE MAIL ACCOUNT, no matter what it is, that I consider it less in terms of credibility, in a business sense.
If someone has a private email address for thier own use, that’s different, but if indeed they use it to do business with us and they are posing as a business contact, I generally disregard it as real. I consider that it could be a competitor, fake inquiry or some just wasting my time.
Now then, these days with such prolific usage of FREE MAIL Accounts, one could say such a suspicion should not apply, but it does and many people still feel the way I do about it.
The solution to allow your email address to show the name of one’s company is a good thing. This solves that issue. I am pleased to have had the opportunity to understand the gmail system better now, so thank you.
Shane: content writer
April 24th, 2008 at 2:26 am
I’ve always avoided using a free email account for the reason mentioned by Lance above… It really does seem rather unproffesional…. I know I’d be rather apprehensive about dealing with a business whose email was a gmail address… It show’s a lack of investment in their own company.. And honestly, if they can’t invest in themselves, why should I invest in them?
However, if you can set up a gmail account to reflect your domain name rather than Gmail’s, it does counteract that drawback… Nonetheless that does seem rather sneaky and not quite above-board
Amrit
April 24th, 2008 at 5:58 am
Shane, Lance: It’s not about using Gmail’s free account, and I totally understand your reservations. In this post I’ve simply explained how you can use Gmail to manage your actual, business email ID. You use the same email ID: yourname@yourdomain.com; it’s just that you are using Gmail’s mail server instead of your webhost’s email server. At the ground level nothing changes, and for that matter, unless you tell, people won’t even know what interface you are using to manage your email.
Web Site Copywriting Services
April 30th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Hey all
IMHO
if you do business right and you think of yourself as a company. you should do all e-mailing from your corporate account (mail ID) ie yourname@yourdomain.com
Basically Gmail is used more for spam these days
regards
MYW
Amrit Hallan
April 30th, 2008 at 7:54 am
Again, when you use Gmail as your business email…in this case, it DOESN’T turn into “something@gmail.com”. You still use your business email ID like “something@yourdomain.com”