Email Synergy

It is surprising how many businesses still use anonymous email services like Hotmail and Yahoo. If your business web site were named Helioza.com, would you really want to have an email address like Ray.Franklin@hotmail.com? Does it promote your website? Can people identify your business from your email address? Of course not. Fortunately, the solution is quite easy.

If you own a web site, then you own a web domain. If you own a web domain, then you can have email accounts using your web domain. Consider this example.

The domain name for the Helioza web site is helioza.com. A valid email address using that domain could be my name: Ray.Franklin@helioza.com. Anyone looking at this address can see my name and my business name. They can reach my business web site just by copying everything to the right of the at sign (@) and pasting it into a web browser. In short, this is the right way to setup email for any business with a web site. It looks, and truly is, integrated and professional.

The key to using your domain name for email is with Google Apps. This is a free or paid service from Google. Many large and small corporations are using the paid service to provide email for thousands of employees worldwide. Universities are using the educational version to provide free email service for faculty and students. The version we want is free, and is named Google Apps Standard Edition.

To successfully setup email you must be able to do the following.

If you cannot do these things yourself, contact the person who does your web site work. Anyone skilled in web site development should be able to complete the Google Apps setup in less than an hour.

Your first step is to go to the Google Apps Standard Edition web page. The link is in the Links section on the right. On the Standard Edition page, click the Get Started button and follow the directions.

On the first page, select the Administrator option and enter your domain name. The other option assumes you already have email setup through your internet hosting provider and is not relevant.

In step 2, you will enter information about the Google Apps account administrator and your business organization. You must provide a valid email address here. The address must use a different domain name than the one you wish to setup. Since you are already using something like Yahoo, that address will be fine. This page also requires you to check a box stating that you understand that you must be able to change DNS records for your domain name. More on this later. Just check the box and proceed.

Step 3 asks you to create the administrator account name and password. Think about this for a bit. This account is both an email address and the administrator of Google Apps. You could enter your own name (ex. rayf), or a primary business account like info. I would suggest a special account just for administration, something like admin. The administrator account is used to create the other accounts for your organization and to manage the other programs in Google Apps. It is cleaner to keep this function separate from the addresses you will use to conduct business with your customers.

When you finish with step 3, you will be taken to your new Google Apps account. The page shown is called the Dashboard. The final step is to activate your email service. This is where the DNS records come into play.

The Setup email delivery page provides detailed instructions for changing the MX records. It even offers specific instructions for more than 30 hosting companies. If yours is not listed, use the generic instructions for Any hosting company.

Be sure to click the link to verify domain ownership. This is where you will upload a small HTML file to your web site. Google will then automatically locate the file, thus verifying that you own the domain. After you change the MX records, Google will complete the activation process, which could take up to a few days.

And that is it. You will have a fully functioning email system and all the other features of Google Apps. You can login as the administrator and create up to 50 email accounts for your business.

Capitals and lower case letters do not matter in an email address. RayF@Helioza.com, rAYf@hElioZa.com and RAYF@HELIOZA.COM are all the same address. The email system just does not care about capital letters. You can use capitals to visually break up the address, like my first example. When printing your email address by hand on a form, be kind to the data entry person who must interpret your scribblings. Write your email address in all capitals using neat, block letters. While the capitalization does not matter, all the other characters must be 100% correct or the message will not get through. If even one letter, underscore, dot or dash is incorrect or out of place, the address is invalid and delivery will fail. It is no big deal if Ray becomes Roy or Rak, but if the email address is wrong, I wasted my time writing it down in the first place.