Why Google Apps is Your Best Email Choice

Google Apps is a powerful suite of online applications.

If you have a Gmail account, you may already be familiar with many of these tools, such as Google Calendar and Google Docs. Google Apps is simply hosting these on your own domain for a business or organization and allowing you to manage organization-wide settings and user accounts. This way, for example, you could have email addresses like “firstname@mycompany.com” and nobody would even know it was powered by Gmail. You can create forms that are only available to people within the organization, share documents and calendars within the organization and so on.

I recommend Google Apps for your domain-hosted email address. It may seem strange to suggest this, given that almost all modern web hosts provide an already-configured tool to give you email accounts “@” your domain. However, the disadvantages I’ve written about elsewhere of ISP-based email accounts apply equally well to web host based accounts: the features are typically inferior, and if you decide to change web hosts you could run into problems. At best, you may have to learn a new interface for accessing your email; at worst, you might not be able to transfer your emails and contacts from the old system to the new, and that would be a time-consuming task regardless.

Google Apps is independent of your web hosting. Your web host goes down? Your email is still working. Decide to change web host providers? Your email is still working. Not only that, but if you use some specialized website service that doesn’t even provide email capabilities, as long as you are able to upload a file or change a server setting, then you can set up Google Apps to provide that email functionality.

Google Apps gives you more than just email. It provides a host of useful features you’d never get with your web host’s built-in email system. These are just a very few:

Gmail Features

• Plenty of space for email storage
• Great spam filtering
• View conversations as a “thread,” so that previous emails on the same subject are shown on the same page
• Uses Google’s search skill whenever you need to search your emails
• “Label” emails instead of filing them into folders, so an email can found through multiple labels
• “Reply from” one email address you own while logged into a different email account

Google Docs

• Documents, spreadsheets, Visio-style drawings and presentations
• Store everything online so you don’t need to worry about your hard drive crashing and losing everything
• Upload files, share them or download them from a different computer
• Share documents with the world or specific individuals, for read-only access or with editing capability
• Collaborate with others on documents, seeing their changes character by character
• Full revision history; you can always change the document to a former version with a few clicks