Gmail for the company domain

Posted on October 22, 2007 by Dave J.

Whoo-hoo! We just finished switching our company’s email hosting to Google’s Gmail service.

After switching my personal B2blog email to Gmail a couple months ago, I couldn’t resist having our corporate email using it. Number one benefit? Spam stays at the server, never hits Outlook at all. (Yes Gmail otherwise works invisibly with Outlook.)

Some hiccups we had doing the switch:

  • Setting POP to pop.google.com instead of pop.gmail.com
  • Forgetting to activate POP service in Gmail first
  • Some computers had Outlook versions that needed a software patch to send
  • Users creating new Outlook ‘profiles’ instead of editing the existing one, thus missing some existing settings like outgoing SMTP authentication.

The big issue I had planned ahead for is that our Goldmine CRM software doesn’t do SSL encryption, which Gmail requires. Instead, I created email accounts in another domain for users, while maintaining the ‘reply to email’ address as their regular email address. The other choice is a shell program called Stunnel (instructions for doing so here and here.)

A couple quick tips for easy transition:

  • Remind people over and over that their email addresses won’t change.
  • Make the change over the weekend, so that the DNS change can propagate and hopefully no emails get sent to the old server on Monday when business resumes.
  • Set your web url for Gmail as gmail.yourcompany.com, so that the old email account can be accessed easily to pull any lingering emails at mail.yourcompany.com that arrived before the switch.

So, now everyone is back to running Outlook and has forgotten about Gmail. I hope they start to go back and play with the online Gmail the other Apps. Wow, a step forward for the whole company!

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  • Larry Hendrick

    <>“Remind people over and over that their email addresses won’t change.”<>I laughed when I got to this sentence, but understand. This whole Internet & email thing is still a mystery to most people.I did something similar for my Mom, only using a regular gmail account. Gmail does the filtering and acts as an authenticated smtp server as she travels. She still uses Outlook Express and isn’t aware of the backside setup.Good job on getting the company to see the value of utilizing Google.

  • Larry Hendrick

    I laughed when I got to this sentence, but understand. This whole Internet & email thing is still a mystery to most people.I did something similar for my Mom, only using a regular gmail account. Gmail does the filtering and acts as an authenticated smtp server as she travels. She still uses Outlook Express and isn’t aware of the backside setup.Good job on getting the company to see the value of utilizing Google.

  • EriC

    Be careful with the Gmail spam filter..We get a lot of legitimate e-mails come through our system, only to get blocked by Gmail’s spam filter. Unless I check the actual Gmail account on the web every day, I can’t be sure I’m not missing something important.

  • EriC

    Be careful with the Gmail spam filter..We get a lot of legitimate e-mails come through our system, only to get blocked by Gmail’s spam filter. Unless I check the actual Gmail account on the web every day, I can’t be sure I’m not missing something important.

  • Love Sea

    it called Google Apps at Domainsite.com and you can take it for free with each domain you register there for free, I just applied it for my < HREF="http://www.azazone.com" REL="nofollow">Azazone<> site. Good service as usual from Google

  • Love Sea

    site. Good service as usual from Google

  • Jeff Shattuck

    Thanks for the pointer on your approach to goldmine. We have been running google for about 6 months with little issue until we purchased ACT!. It has the same SSL requirements. I have found the google browser email app much better than outlook. Plus with company wide chat the more people I can win over the better it gets. So far only about 20 in 200 have been willing to walk away from the comfort of outlook but once they do they are sold.

  • Robert

    How is your gmail transition going? So you are running outlook for some and gmail for others? Is your domain name affected by using two email services?Did you just add the mx records for the gmail service and keep the mx records for exchange on there at the same time?I currently forward all my work email to my gmail account. Mainly for the spam filter and the web interface….I just hate using outlook.

  • Robert

    How is your gmail transition going? So you are running outlook for some and gmail for others? Is your domain name affected by using two email services?Did you just add the mx records for the gmail service and keep the mx records for exchange on there at the same time?I currently forward all my work email to my gmail account. Mainly for the spam filter and the web interface….I just hate using outlook.

  • Dave J.

    Thanks for asking how it is going, Robert. Little issues here and there, but overall going great. We don’t run Exchange, which made switching all the easier. Most people still prefer having a separate application to manage their email, but my boss switched to all-Gmail when he went to a new position.

  • Dave J.

    Thanks for asking how it is going, Robert. Little issues here and there, but overall going great. We don’t run Exchange, which made switching all the easier. Most people still prefer having a separate application to manage their email, but my boss switched to all-Gmail when he went to a new position.

  • Jeff Shattuck

    Thanks for the pointer on your approach to goldmine. We have been running google for about 6 months with little issue until we purchased ACT!. It has the same SSL requirements. < />< />I have found the google browser email app much better than outlook. Plus with company wide chat the more people I can win over the better it gets. So far only about 20 in 200 have been willing to walk away from the comfort of outlook but once they do they are sold.