Using Gmail For Your Domain Name Based Emails

More and more we see people moving to “the cloud” for their business needs. If you’re still not sure what “the cloud” refers to, basically it means that your files are stored and/or worked on “up on the internet”. e.g DropBox, Google Drive and Gmail are all examples of cloud based services. These services allow you to store your files/emails on their servers as an alternative to, or a mirror of the files on your computer.

The benefits of using Gmail to collect your domain based emails

For the examples below, we’ll use a pretend company name “fredscompany.com”

• You can easily access your emails on any computer, tablet or smart phone that is connected to the internet.
• Your emails are backed up across many servers.
• If you bring in your emails from fred@fredscompany.com you can answer and “send as”  fred@fredscompany.com. This means that a user will see that the email comes from fred@fredscompany.com  and not Google mail.

How is this better than bringing mail down to Outlook or other mail programs?

• You may not have the savvy to backup your emails. Thus, if your hard drive crashed, you would lose all your mail.
• You may have only ever used webmail services in the first place. In this case you might not want to go to the trouble of installing and maintaining a mail program on your computer.
• Having your emails localised in one place on an office computer means that you won’t be able to access your emails when you are out of the office.

How to bring your mail into Gmail

1. Firstly you need to have a POP email account. This is a standard email account that you can set up in your web hosting tools for your web site. You can set this up yourself, or ask your hosting provider to do this for you.The mail account needs to be configured to allow the use of the outgoing mail server.
2. Go to your Google mail account settings (the little cog in the top right corner) and choose “settings”.
3. Then click “Accounts”.
4. Then “Add a POP3 mail account you own”
5. After you have added your details in 5, under “send mail as” click “add another email address that you own”.
6. Enter the email address and click Next
7. Choose “Send through fredscompany.com SMTP servers”
8. Enter the SMTP Server details, username and password.
9. Click “Add Account” and then follow the prompts for verification

Once set up, you will have the ease of dealing with your emails from a multitude of locations and any device such as smart phone or a tablet can be configured to login to your Gmail.