For years I’ve been hollering at conferences, training sessions, teleclasses and even once in a movie theater at a CEO to never, never, never, ever, never use webmail programs like Hotmail or AOL for your business address. Domain names are cheap and hosting is cheap and it’s…

YOUR BRAND

… and you don’t want to build up someone else’s brand. No one is going to remember chellesawesometravel@yahoo.com when they want to book with you. You aren’t ‘in all your clients’ contact lists” and shouldn’t change it.  Trust me on this,  it looks like you share an email address with a 15 year old kid on MySpace 22 hours a day.

So, I’ll say this ONE LAST TIME.

Get a real email address that matches your domain name and use it. You’re a professional. This is a Big Deal.

Are we clear? Now. Once you’ve done that, go get a Gmail account. Yes, I’m serious.

Gmail and your own email address with your own domain name play together nicely. More than nicely, in fact. It’s a marriage made in tech-heaven.

Here are ten reasons why:

1. Web Based Goodness – meaning you’re not tied to one computer. You can get your mail on your desktop, laptop, iphone, ipod touch, Windows Mobile phone – or any other internet enabled device. There’s even special small applications for on-the-go users.
   
2. Offline Access – If you’re not connected to the Internet, the “offline” capability allows you to still work on your email and it will sync the next time you are connected.
3. Labels – Gmail calls them labels, but really, they’re tags. Tags are “IT” – they allow you to simply and easily add keywords to describe what something is about, and then archive it for retrieval later.
4. Powerful search capabilities – no more scrolling through folders. Even if you don’t label something (which you should) the search capabilities are what you’d expect from Google.
5. The Archive – This took me a little while to get used to when converting from Outlook. Instead of putting an email into a folder (which is, in essence a single label, right?) – I can add multiple labels and then archive an email. I don’t have to remember the one place where I put an email and struggle to remember what the heck I was thinking that day (taxes or receipts?) – It’s labeled with a many labels as I think are appropriate and a quick click on any one of them gets me all the emails tagged with that label. I can then refine the search further.
6. Same features I have come to know and love – Vacation Auto Responders, Signatures, Attachments, Rules (called filters)… PLUS features on steroids: Youtube, Flickr, Create Documents, Text Messaging, Maps and Calendars, to name a few.  All integrated and at my fingertips. And, there are more every day!
7. STORAGE – Any web hosting company will tell you that storage for email can get out of control. Some companies leave a feature turned on in Outlook to leave a copy of every message on the server in case… just in case… in case of what? I don’t know. It adds up and crashes the whole company’s email account when the allocation is gone. Gmail solves that. Most hosting company defaults allow 200MB of disk space per mailbox.  Gmail currently allows a whopping 7356 MB. Even after three years of heavy usage I still have only 22% of that used.

8. Account Management – I said before: Gmail and your own email address play nicely together. With Gmail account management NO ONE need ever know that you even have a Gmail address. You’re not changing your address. Let me repeat that – you’re not changing your address to Gmail. Simply configure Gmail to pull the mail from your web hosts server. Here’s the cool part: when you reply to the mail it will show the account it was sent to – Gmail remains transparent! You can have 5 POP accounts (pulling from a server) or you can have unlimited accounts if the mail is forwarded from your host and not stored there until Gmail picks it up. Either way is fine, but I set it up so that the mail would stay on my server and I could use my web host’s webmail program in case Gmail went down. Which, it hasn’t in 3 years.

9. SPAM Filtering – Despite the never-ending battle, Spam continues. Fortunately, I’m not fighting the battle – I’m back sipping mai-tai’s while Gmail does all the heavy lifting. Occasionally – maybe 10 times in 3 years – it tags something as Spam and it’s not, but I found it in the Spam folder and pushed it back to my Inbox. Only 4 times has something slipped though that wasn’t nice. I got to click the “SPAM” button to report it and move on. That’s the beauty of a shared web-program. Speed. If 5,000 people click the Spam button (I’m making that number up, of course) then it’s got to be Spam and it’s stopped for everyone else. No waiting for a patch or download. Oh, and here’s a bonus: I stopped spending money on virus programs years ago. Since they don’t come through Gmail, and I don’t click on them, I don’t get them.
   
   
10. It plays nicely with other things, too. I love a couple of Customer Relationship Managment programs like Highrise and BatchBlue. Gmail’s advanced website programming languages are common to other programs, so it syncs up nicely. If I change a contact phone number in Gmail, it’s changed in my CRM – and – my Mobile Phone. No, I did not need a Master’s Degree from MIT to set that up.

Gmail is by definition a web-based email application. By design, however, it’s a business relationship manager. Every smart business consultant will tell you that keeping all your information simple and accessible is one key to success. Gmail gives you an entire set of keys.