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.

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Why does Microsoft do this to me? And yes I mean me and me only. Clearly they have nothing better to do up in Redmond than think of ways to mess with Smartalyx.

A client’s computer had a hardware failure, so we moved to a new computer. Simple enough- transfer files and bam up and running. Except for Outlook. I understand that MS needs to move on with their software and can’t be held back by old technologies, but Outlook is basically an EMAIL program used by most consumers. In an office environment it can be so much more, but for the large majority Exchange server does not exist- so all the links built in with calendar and tasks are a little overkill. And you have a harder time avoiding Outlook if you install one of the office suites.

Back to the problem- PST files. I hate them. Why must it be so complicated to store emails, Microsoft? I can move my Thunderbird EMAIL among many computers and operating systems. So this is my call for everyone to give up programs that lock you into a specific format. Look at all the flavors of online EMAIL out there- GMAIL, Yahoo and Zoho are three right off the top. Zoho and Google both have offline modes. You can also have your local tech person setup a GMAIL account to check your other email accounts (POP3 required, your tech guy will know what that is) so all your mail comes into one account. GMAIL allows you to reply through GMAIL using the original EMAIL address (verification emails are used to confirm you are the owner of the accounts)

Using online EMAIL frees up the end user a couple of ways- first your EMAIL is ’safe’ from computer crashes since the data is not only stored locally. And second- the online providers take care of software upgrades and you never need to worry about version compatibility. Yes, there is the chance an online EMail provider can disappear but stick with the larger companies and that is less likely.

So take a look at the online options- or better yet, give Smartalyx a ring and we can help you out.

what have been your experiences with online EMAIL? Let me know.

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