Managing Email

If your business has less than fifty employees, or if it's just you on your own, what's the best way to manage your email?

Well, I very recently reviewed all the possibilities as I was working out how to deal with the email for Bullfrey.com, and I thought you might find some of that research useful.

I wanted a system that would meet the following requirements:

Be available offline so that I could review old email and write new ones when I wasn't able to access the Internet.

Be available online through a web browser so that I could access it from any computer anywhere - and not just current unread email, all of my old email as well.

Be accessible via a mobile device.

Be very good at filtering out spam.

Not cost the earth.

The options that I considered were:

Download all my email from a POP3 server that also has web mail capability. This is what I used initially, but of course as soon as you download an email, it's no longer available online. Workable, but not too great.

Host your own email server with MS Exchange. Well, first of all you have to buy a copy of MS exchange (££), and more importantly, you need a computer that is always switched on, has a very reliable Internet connection, and have a backup strategy. A whole lot of money, and a whole lot of work. Not very appealing.

Host your own email server with Open Source technologies. As above, but no software license costs. Still a huge pain in the butt though.

Use a hosted MS Exchange Service. All the advantage of an Exchange server for a reasonable monthly fee. I was seriously considering this, until my friend Camille told me about:

Google Apps for domains.

You can set it up to receive all the email to your domain, and you can have anything up to 50 user accounts with different addresses. Each account has 2 GB of storage, and you can download it with POP3 for offline access. Anything that you send from Outlook is also stored online.

It took a little while to adjust to the user interface online, but once I did - wow. I love it. I rarely use my desktop email client anymore. I don't get any spam. It just works and I don't have to think about it. I still download all of my email, so that I have a copy of it should anything go wrong with the service, and I can switch back to my old system using POP3 within minutes if I really need to in case their system collapses (which is unlikely - something tells me that their infrastructure is probably more robust that mine!).

I also love the online calendar, which allows me to bring in other people's calenders and show them on mine, and also publish selected calendars (e.g. course dates) publicly if I want to.

How much does it cost? Well at the moment it costs nothing, which is pretty good value.