Outsourcing Email to Google Apps Hosted Services
Our company recently switched from hosting our email internally on our own servers, to outsourcing to Google Hosted Services, the new Google Apps service which is an extension of Google's Gmail for Your Domain. This article is about our experience with the service, and with Google's email system in general.
We're a small Internet publishing company—about 10 employees. Over the past 10 years we've been running our own IT infrastructure, including a couple of web servers, mail server, internal networking, and all the general software installations and upgrades that come with running a business.
Slowly, we've been moving our own hosted sites off-site to third party web-hosting companies. It just became too time consuming to keep up with all the upgrades, power service issues, and maintenance, and the cost of hosting has fallen dramatically over the years to where it made good economic sense to do so.
Drowning in Spam
We run a number of websites, and are very actively involved in the Internet business. Our websites have been around for a long time, and consequently we get quite a bit of Spam email. For some of the websites we run, we perform Customer Service functions, so we have to look pretty carefully at incoming email to make sure that it's not from a customer. For example, an email with no text in the Subject line may or may not be Spam. And sometimes legitimate customer emails get filtered out as Spam, so we generally feel the need to also visually scan the emails that have been filtered as Spam.
We do run Spam Assassin, but the amount of Spam seems to have grown exponentially over the past couple of years, and little by little we realized that for a small company, we spend quite a bit of time battling Spam and the associated headaches that come with it. We never quite figured out why we were still getting so much Spam, but I think that our mail servers were simply overwhelmed with the tens of thousands of Spam email that were coming in that it just couldn't handle it all.
Overall, I would say that Spam management is the major reason that we decided to outsource the company's email.
Outsourcing Email to Google
As a trial, a few months ago we set up one of our website's email on Gmail for incoming mail. We had considered using the web-based Gmail to check and send email in order to have more flexibility for telecommuters, but it seemed as though the Gmail domain name would have to appear in the email header.
Instead, we configured Microsoft Outlook to check the incoming mail via POP. Outgoing mail is still sent from our own mail server.
We estimate that Gmail's Spam filtering has saved our email Customer Service employee about 1 hour every day in sorting through and answering customer emails, and overall, we've been pleased with the Gmail solution. However, since we still use Outlook, the main benefit has been the improved Spam filtering.
Google Apps Hosted Services Email
On August 28, 2006 Google released the Beta version of Google Apps for Your Domain, and a few weeks later we took the plunge and changed all our email over to Google. The switch was forced upon us in some way, as a construction crew had disrupted one of our Internet access lines, so it just seemed like a good time to make the switch. Installation was straightforward and was accomplished without a hitch.
Most of the folks in the office still wanted to use Microsoft Outlook to read and store email, which is certainly possible using the Google Apps service. But because we all had to haul our laptops into the office to work over a wireless network, we also began using Google to send and receive email, as well as for the office calendar.
Using the Gmail eMail System
For those of you who haven't used the Google email interface, it is a bit different from what most people are used to. For example, you can't sort emails by Date, Name, or Subject. Rather the program relies more on Google's powerful search to find specific emails.
Google "Conversations"
After using Google, you'll stop thinking of emails as individual communications. Google groups related messages into what it calls "conversations."
For example, if you send a message to three colleagues, with Gmail, each of your colleagues responses are then grouped with the original message, creating a single conversation in your inbox, rather than wading through your inbox trying to find all the related messages and follow them. This puts the entire conversation in context and makes your inbox easier to manage.
Collapsed conversations messages are stacked on top of eachother, with the latest one on top for easy viewing.
Labels
There is no folder system, as is standard in Outlook, Yahoo or MSN emails. Instead, Google relies on a Labels tagging system. Labels act as folders in many ways, but also allow some additional benefits. Multiple Labels can be assigned to each message, for example. Selecting a Label link from the side navigation will display all the messages with that label.
Google Talk
In the Google Apps version of email, Google Talk replaces Gmail's original Google Notifier application. Google talk is a chat program like Yahoo or MSN messenger, and also serves as a task bar alert to notify you when a new message comes in. Like those programs, it includes talk functionality. With a microphone and speaker, you can call and speak with other Google Talk users for free.
Web Clips
Web Clips show you news headlines, Gmail tips, blogs, any RSS and Atom feed, relevant sponsored links, and more. You can add your own RSS feed URLs to have customized content at the top of the Inbox and messages. It works as a Newsreader, and much like Google Talk, it is terribly useful and distracting at the same time—especially if you are a news junkie.
Other Google Gmail Features and Missing Features
There are some other useful features you'll find using Gmail:
- Mail via Atom RSS: You can set up Gmail to read your mail via RSS in news aggregators, such as Bottom Feeder, Feed Demon or NewsGator. Make sure to set the feed as private so others won't be able to read your email Subject and Snippet.
- Mobile eMail: Access your Gmail from your mobile phone by entering http://m.gmail.com in your phone's web browser to log in to your account. You can access photos, MS Word docs or PDFs that are attached to your email
What's Missing from Gmail?
So far, there are only a couple of things we found that we miss. If there's a remedy for these issues, please let us know and we'll update.
- Sorting: We already mentioned that you can't sort your Inbox by Subject, Date, or From name. It may just take some getting used to the search, but it would be nice to be able to sort.
- Reply Button on Top of Message: It's a bit annoying that there's no Reply button on the top of the page—especially when reading longer messages. You can make it appear by clicking a More Options link to show additional options such as Reply, Reply All, Forward, etc., but we haven't found a way to set a preference to keep Show Options open for all messages.
There is a Reply button at the bottom of the message, with the additional handy feature of simply clicking inside the reply text box to start to reply but particularly on longer messages it can be quite a scroll to get there.
Overall, we're all looking forward to the new feeling of freedom from Spam and mail server maintenance by outsourcing our company's email to the free Google Hosted Services.
We're also looking forward to escaping from Outlook by using the web-based Google mail and shared calendar. Overall, the Google Apps package seems robust and well designed, and we would highly recommend the switch.
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