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No Comments Written by Robert on April 11, 2008 – 6:58 pm

Gmail has gained huge acceptance as a free e-mail service that individuals can use for personal use. A Gmail account works well as an extra e-mail account to supplement a primary account, for instance. But Gmail is much more than that

It’s a tool that also promotes business-to-business (B2B) communications. B2B doesn’t only mean doing business with other companies or giving access to individuals outside your organization. It also refers to techniques that enable segments of your company to reach other parts of that same company B2E or business-to-employee communications, in other words. If you need to disseminate information to your employees through the Web, enable staff to share ideas through bulletin boards, newsletters, or other publications, or if you need to connect employees who work in different locations where they might not have access to their e-mail through a specially designated e-mail application, then establishing Gmail accounts for them is a logical first step.

You can, of course, set up e-mail accounts with just about any service that gives you access to the Internet. The typical DSL or cable account also lets you set up 10, 20, or more separate e-mail addresses. So there’s nothing exclusive about using Google as an e-mail application for a group of coworkers. But it does give you a set of business advantages that you should take into account:

Advantages of Gmail Over Other Services

• It uses a Web browser. You can use any Web browser to get your e-mail, which enables you to use any computer connected to the Internet. You don’t need to worry about installing or updating Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Netscape Messenger, or other e-mail programs.
• You get a huge amount of storage space. Google continually increases the amount of space it gives to users. The amount may well be larger by the time you read this. But currently you get 2.8 GB of free storage, which is more than many individuals have on their home computers. The storage space gives it an edge over other free e-mail services such as MSN Hotmail or Yahoo! Hotmail.
• It can check for e-mail that arrives at multiple accounts. Not only can you forward e-mail from other accounts to a single Gmail address, but Gmail can be configured to check for incoming mail at up to five other accounts and open them in a single Gmail account.
• It provides you with search-based organization. Rather than grouping your sent, incoming, or deleted mail into folders, Google uses its own sophisticated and familiar search technology to help you find what you want in your e-mail ‘‘archives.’’
• They have a gmail related blog.

By entering search terms in the Gmail search box, you can locate many different types of information. For instance, if you want to find all the messages from a particular individual, enter a search query such as this:

from:bill_g@mydomain.com

This will retrieve all messages sent to you from the user with this particular e-mail address. You can also use ‘‘in:’’ to search a particular folder, or one of the following to search for e-mail addresses by date: before:date (yyyy/mm/dd) after:date (yyyy/mm/dd) These will retrieve all e-mail messages sent either before or after a particular date, for instance.

Gmail has a lot of good points and it covers most if not all of the basic features you need from an e-mail program. But even devoted Gmail users complain about one problem: spam. Gmail has spam filters like other e-mail services, but they are far from perfect. You can expect this problem to be the same, if not worse, when you sign up for Gmail as it is with your current provider.

Gmail for Your Domain

Suppose you have signed up for Google Apps and you have obtained your own new domain. How do you get Gmail up and running for you and your colleagues? It’s easy: first, you establish an account for an individual:

1. Go to the Google Apps login page, http://www.google.com/a, and click Returning user, sign in here.
2. In the box labeled Enter, type your domain name (for example, mydomain. com) in the box provided.
3. Choose Manage this domain from the drop-down list next to the domain name box and click Go.You go to the Dashboard page for your domain.
4. Click Create new users.
5. When the Create a new user page appears, fill out the form provided. The text you enter in the Username box becomes the first part of that user’s e-mail address. For example, if your domain name is mycompany.com and you enter ‘‘fred,’’ the user’s e-mail address will be fred@mycompany.com.
6. Continue filling out the form by assigning a new password and then clicking the Create new user button. Once the user’s account has been created, he or she automatically has e-mail set up through Google Apps.

For example, if the user fred@mycompany.com needs to check his e-mail, he first needs to sign on to the domain as described in steps 1 and 2 in the preceding set up steps. Instead of choosing Manage this domain from the drop-down list, Fred would choose Email and then click Go. When the login page appears, Fred would simply enter ‘‘fred’’ in the username box and the appropriate password in the password box, and then click Sign In. Fred would then be taken to his Gmail inbox, which looks and operates exactly the same as Gmail for someone who has a standalone Gmail account.

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