Email plays an important role in managing your business so important in fact that it has become essential; which is a good reason to always have an alternative email address whatever the case may be.
Google provides a free email service (namely Gmail) which has enough features that it goes hand in hand with your business address.
Using a Gmail address for business isn't considered very professional (since anyone can sign up for one), but it's a great way to insure you never miss another important email.
For more information about how to setup a Gmail address see our article on How To Open A Gmail Account. If you don't already have a business email; we offer two services that helps you maintain a professional business front end, with the benefit of Gmail on the back end.
For a more customized email address, choose from our range of Domain Name Services and Hosting Packages.
Setting up Gmail in the back end
The first technique will be covering in this series is how to use your Gmail address in the back end.
This can easily be done by creating a forwarder to your Gmail account rather than an inbox for every business email you require.
That is it really and since setting up a forwarder is part of your hosting package it comes down to any number of factors. My suggestion is you contact your hosting provider for further assistance.
The advantages of this technique
Unless Google's servers are down (which is very unlikely), you'll never have to worry about loosing another email, ever again.
Also instead of managing multiple email inboxes, you can now view all your emails from one address.
Each email can then be filtered into various "folders"
(I use the term folder very loosely since Gmail doesn't have actual folders); depending on which email the mail was sent to.
And because you're using a forwarder (all your emails are sent or forwarded to your Gmail address, instead of landing on the forwarding email's inbox) you don't use any disk space on your hosting package to store emails since it will all be stored on Google's servers.
Not only will you not be using your hosting accounts disk space for emails storage but Gmails servers offer up to 10 Giga Bytes of disk space which increases over time so you'll never have to worry about running out of email storage space or deleting another email ever again.
Another important advantage to note is that Gmail is a online service which enables you to view your emails for any internet accessible device like your mobile phone, tablet or another PC just by logging into your account on that device.
The disadvantage
Some business find this practice to be counter productive since they no longer have control over the incoming and out going mail.
However this can be managed, by however the business sees fit.
We will be providing more information on how to manage you Gmail address in the next part of this series so to insure you don't miss anything be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, our RSS feed and like us on Facebook to stay up to date with the most current information.