If you haven’t, you might want to take a second look at it. Gmail is a wonderful and robust email service that can really boost your productivity – and frankly, can reduce your stress. Think about it. How many times have you had your email just stop working, disconnect, or lag hours behind? It’s a critical problem that can really cause your business to take a hit – especially if you do most of your business through email. I’m here to say that since I started using Gmail a few years ago, I’ve not had even a second of downtime.
Chances are if your business is using a personal email, such as mick@mickolinik.com, you are running your email using your hosting plan with a protocol called POP3. POP3 is a very simple protocol that essentially does two things:
- It accepts text messages and small files under 10MB
- It sends text messages and small files under 10MB
Then what typically happens is you have an email client such as Outlook, Mail, or Thunderbird that pings the POP3 service and asks if they can download a copy of all the messages/files its received.
That’s it! That’s all hosting/server email really is. It’s just a service that runs on your server and then a third party client that asks for the messages. You might have noticed how I never mentioned anything about security, spam filtering, or anything else you might think is standard. That’s because there essentially isn’t any. Chances are unless you are paying for a full-on SSL certificate, which is a few hundred dollars in addition to your hosting cost every year, your login information is being sent in plain text. This means that your password is sent in the clear over the internet. Any tech savvy malicious user could easily sniff your password on an open wifi connection. If it’s the same password you use for your hosting account, they’ve not only gained access to your email, but your hosting as well.
Not to mention if you use that password on multiple sites… well, that’s a totally different blog post. But just be aware things could get pretty ugly if you became a hacker’s target.
This is where Gmail steps in…
Google saw these problems – probably because they had to deal with them themselves – and they thought, “Hey, why don’t we change this and make email more secure and reliable for the world.” And that’s exactly what they’ve done. Here is how Gmail is different:
- Government Grade SSL Security
- Advanced Spam Filtering
- Labels and Organization Tools
- Almost 10GB of Storage (with upgrade options)
- Google Search Powered
- It’s totally FREE.
If I haven’t yet convinced you to jump ship and head over to Google as your mail provider, stay tuned. This is simply the start of a four-part series on Gmail where I hope to give some insight on what Gmail is, using Gmail, and eventually how to setup Gmail (Google Apps) for your domain.
