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Using Google hosted mail with CactuShop hosting
Question
I've read about Google's small business offerings, including hosted Gmail for companies. Is it any good? Can my Cactusoft hosting be setup to use this?
Answer
Gmail is a very popular free web mail service provided by Google. It provides excellent spam filtering (the best we've seen, and we've seen a lot over the years) and 2GB of storage so "you'll never have to delete a mail again". Furthermore, you can use Google's search excellence to quickly find messages even if you have thousands of emails. But as well as the best webmail interface there is, you can use the service with Outlook Express, Thunderbird or any other standard mail reader, downloading messages from your Google account in exactly the same way as any normal mail service.
Now you can enjoy all the benefits of Gmail *and* use your own domain. The perfect solution for any small company that wants speed, reliability, remote access and automatic archiving of all mail.
To set this up with our hosting, there are a few steps. The first is to go to the Google Apps site and sign up. The free standard edition should be fine for most companies, but the Premier edition is still reasonably priced for power users.
Once you have done this, Google walks you through the process of proving you own the domain (by FTPing a file to your site and telling Google to check that it is in place) and then setting up users. We would recommend this file upload verification method over the CNAME change because it is quicker and you can do it yourself. You'd need to get us to setup the CNAME record, and once done it can take anywhere from a few hours to a day to take effect.
Once you want to switch your mail over to Google, open a support ticket and make sure you specify the domain (web site) if you have several hosted with us. We can do the MX record changes as described on Google's site. These generally take a few hours to fully take effect due to the dispersed nature of the DNS system that controls domain-IP address mapping.
Note: we can only change MX records for domains hosted with us. If your site is running CactuShop on another host, we cannot make this change. You need to contact the host of the site.
The final stage is to setup your mail client to collect and send using Gmail servers.
First make sure each email account is set to allow POP collection:
Enabling POP collection within Google hosted mail
Then you need to configure your mail program to collect and send through Gmail.
Setup instructions for using various mail clients such as Outlook and Thunderbird with hosted Gmail
Read these instructions on Google's site very carefully as they are quite specific about certain settings and it will not work unless you follow them to the letter. If your exact mail client is not listed, use the closest alternative. For example, we found that the Thunderbird 1.5 instructions worked perfectly for Thunderbird 2.0.
You will discover that when you send mail from the Gmail web interface, you receive a copy to your email address next time you log in with your email client such as Outlook. In most email programs you should be able to devise a filter to automatically move such mails (which are 'from' your own address) to the 'sent' folder. This way your local 'sent' folder will update with a copy of everything you sent from the web interface. Inside the web interface, you will notice the same happens with the 'sent' folder there - it contains copies of messages sent out from your email program. Pretty cool!
If you follow these and are still having problems, the page has a link near the bottom to a software download that can figure out what settings you have wrong. It worked perfectly for us.
We've been using the Gmail system ourselves and found the anti-spam filtering to be first class. There are other benefits too. The fact that it remembers all mail, including mail you send from your desktop mail program, provides you with a useful mail archive in the event that your hard disk crashes taking your local mail archive with it.
The Google Apps service also features an excellent calendar service that allows each user to keep private and shared calendars.
If you have an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch, you can use the built-in mail application to read and write your company mail too (as it supports Gmail).
Find out more about Google Apps here:
https://www.google.com/a/smallbiz/