Smartalyx Computer Musings

Decided to extend my look at online solutions for your business. You will see in my previous post I mentioned moving away from local EMAIL and begin using one of the online solutions. I will show you how Smartalyx has been doing that. This post will deal directly with GMAIL, but over the next few posts I will also show how to setup a similar experience using ZOHO tools and others.

First off, you need to make sure that you have POP access to your account. Not all providers allow this (Yahoo basic email does not for example), so you will need to check with your email provider. Once this is confirmed you can then begin using GMAIL to check those accounts. The feature is called “Mail Fetcher”. Smartalyx owns and runs the domain “smartalyx.com” and all our emails are managed by us as well. We have setup POP access and therefore can use any tool we choose to access our EMAIL.

Why even use an online EMAIL provider when we have local access to our email? Well, online access allows us to use any tools available at the time to review/respond to email. Also if we lose any of our equipment we do not lose the EMAIL. Using an online provider makes the synchronization of information automatic. I can jump on any of our systems (desktop or laptop) login to our online EMAIL and see all my EMAIL. No longer do I need to use a add-on piece of software to sync across multiple systems or devices. I see the same email on my desktop, laptop and even iPod Touch. So how do we do that? That’s next.

First thing- setup a GMAIL account. Go to the Google Gmail page and choose “Sign up”

Provide the requested information and get your GMAIL account. Google provides 10 Reasons to use GMAIL. After you setup your account, make sure you are logged in. Choose “Settings” in the upper right and then choose the “Accounts” tab.

Then choose the “Add a mail account you own”. Google provides much detail here. Or feel free to contact Smartalyx to give you and/or your company a hand setting this up.

Once you have followed all the steps the email you have setup will appear in your GMAIL. Using “tags” and “filters” will allow you more easily see specific Email accounts. I have company email accounts tagged in the picture below.

As you can see EMAILs to my company address are tagged “Smartalyx EMAIL” and red, while EMAILs sent to my GMAIL address are not. This makes it easy for me to identify the different accounts. I also leave the other EMAILs on the other providers servers to allow me additional flexibility with my email access and backup (specifics covered in another upcoming post).

Now that I have GMAIL setup this way, whenever I have an Internet connection (regardless of the device I am using) I can go to one web site to see all my EMAIL. No longer do I need to go to GMAIL for my gmail address and then other sites for my other addresses. A great time saver.

Next post will cover how to do this in other clients. Stay tuned.

Let me know you thoughts and experiences?