Using Free and Reliable Business Email Hosting
How to Avoid Email Costs With Google Apps
Sep 24, 2009
With the growing use of technology over the past years, emails have taken a leading part in a company's success. Memos are seldom seen nowadays, and there are organizations that take pride in being completely paperless.
Large enterprises, understanding the importance of electronic communication, often choose to keep their own dedicated servers within reach - not relying on third party hosts to handle such an important aspect of their business.
High Costs of Email Solutions
Smaller companies often have to bite the bullet and hire outsourced email servers due to the high costs of keeping their own. Hosting companies understand the importance of emails and often take advantage of their customers, charging for additional email accounts, larger mailbox sizes, and even throughput - the amount of data sent to and from the user's email address.
Introducing Google Apps
A solution for the small- to middle-sized business that needs a better email solution is provided by Google in the form of Google Apps.
It is a suite of applications aimed at improving business communications which includes Gmail - Google's famous email solution, Google Talk - a web-based chat program, Google Docs - a reliable way to share documents online, and Google Sites - which allows users to easily build their own web pages. All these being accessible from the company's very own domain.
Signing up for Google Apps
Google Apps comes in several editions: Premier, Standard, Education, Non-profit, Team, and Government. Standard Edition is free of charge and allows up to 50 email accounts. It is recommended for small businesses that need a large amount of mailbox space (currently slightly over 7GB per account), and can't afford the high email costs imposed by other hosting companies. Google Apps is not only free - it is also secure and reliable.
Users can sign up for Google Apps Standard Edition by clicking the link above and then on the button Get Started. They will have the choice of entering the domain of their organization if they already have one, and can even choose to buy a domain from Google at a small annual cost.
The next step is to fill in a form with the user's business information, and finally to create a user name and password for the administrator.
How to set up Google Apps After Creating an Account
In order for Google to be able to manage email delivery for an organization using Google Apps, the administrator must make some modifications to their DNS settings - mainly regarding the MX records. Business owners lacking a capable administrator and who do not understand DNS workings need not worry - a comprehensive explanation of DNS terminology can be found here.
The ways of changing DNS information is usually different according to each web hosting company. Specific information on how to modify MX entries in several well known such companies can also be found in the Support section of Google Apps after creating the account.
Webmail, POP3, IMAP... or all of the above!
The most commonly known interface for Google's emailing solution is Gmail through a web browser. It is easy to use and full of features. Google Apps uses the same exact interface, the only difference being that the user's email address contains the company's domain instead of gmail.com.
Another option is to enable POP3 or IMAP services to download messages to the users' email clients such as Outlook Express or MS Outlook. Gmail's interface will keep track of both incoming and outgoing emails and will group them up when using the web interface to track a conversation.
Summary
Signing up for a Google Apps account is an easy and reliable way to avoid high email hosting costs with other companies. Changes to DNS server entries are required, but not difficult to perform since Google provides extensive information on how to do so.
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