The world’s best email and your own domain name

What’s the best webmail in the world? If you answered Gmail, I’m with you. I’ve been using the Internet since 1995 and I’ve tried all sorts of email services ranging from desktop applications like Outlook, The Bat, Thunderbird, and many web services such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Mail.com and many others. In my personal and professional opinion Gmail is hands down the absolute best email service in the world. I’m sure all of you have tried it and know how fast and reliable it is, how simple and nice it looks, the features we can’t live without, and the enormous disk space storage it comes with and so much more.

So I don’t blame you if you are using (or wanting to use) Gmail as your business email — I do and I’m loving it. But my absolute pet peeve is when I get business cards that have someone@gmail.com or someone@freeservice.com — it doesn’t look professional, in fact, it kind of looks cheesy. Well you are in luck. Not too long ago Google started offering a service called Hosted Gmail. It’s now called Google Apps. It allows you to map your own domain name to a set of Google tools like Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Videos and more.

By mapping your domain name to Gmail you can use you@yourdomain.com instead of you@gmail.com and you will be able to send and receive email using the familiar Gmail interface. The service is free, it comes with a web based control panel where you can create additional email accounts, adjust various email settings, and more. Each email account you create comes with a little over 7 GB of disk space. So if you’re hosting your blog on a shared hosting account with a limited amount of disk space, you can configure your domain name to use Gmail for your email, and get so much more disk space at no additional cost. In fact, if you need more disk space Gmail has a Premier Edition (for a fee) which gives you 25 GB of space and 99% SLA (reliability). The service is also redundant, which means if your hosting account is having some issues and your blog stops working — your email continues to work!

I’ve helped many customers with that kind of configuration, so if you have any questions post them below and I’ll do my best to answer them all.