Google Apps for Your Business Email

Email is a very important aspect of your business, both off-line and online. You may use the email that came with your web hosting package. Whether your on a shared or a dedicated hosting plan, you may use squirrel mail, horde or something similar.

When you host your own email, you are dependent on the uptime of your webhost. Many times, your email is routed through separate servers and you may have noticed how slow your email can be at times.

In addition, you may waste a lot of time cleaning out your mailbox from the daily barrage of spam that comes your way. But there is a better way: Google mail (Gmail) for business. Just change a few settings in your DNS zone file and within hours you’ll be sending mail through Google.

Google’s mail system uses many redundant servers for backup, so there is less chance for any email outage. Mail will be sent and received much quicker and you’ll be using a user interface that you may be already familiar with if you use Gmail. The beauty of using Google Apps is, is that there will be so much less spam every day, that you have more time focusing on what’s important for your business.

You also have the ability to filter out certain emails (the ones that are not really spam, but you don’t wish to see).

How to Get Started?

There is a very good and detailed write-up over here. This is specific to Mediatemple, but is applicable to most web hosts. One thing to keep in mind however, is that unless you are hosting your own name-servers, you need to make the changes to you DNS Zone in your account center (and NOT on your dedicated virtual server (if you have one), unless you have your own name servers). A good thing to add to your DNS settings, is 1 additional spf record for Google (follow Google’s instructions). Leave the spf record for your own server intact. The 2 spf records will make sure that mail send through Google and sendmail (send through Google), will not be filtered as spam by other ISPs.

How to use Google Apps with Sendmail?

Many users will notice that emails send through sendmail are no longer working. What you need to do, is to TURN off (disable) the mail service on your own server. You’ll need to do this for any alias and individual accounts as well.

For any accounts or alias account that you used for sendmail, you’ll have to set up a separate account on Google. For alias accounts this is called “nickname” on Google. On Google you can forward any email account to another account you own. You’ll also have the option to just forward mail (for example, the sendmail from your server) and not to keep a copy of it in your Google account. So in short, there is no need to change any config file of sendmail on your server.