The world is definitely changing. Once, email for most people meant having an email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express – and this client would interact with their server to collect the email waiting for them in their service providers email server.

Then along came Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Webmail interfaces to their existing email accounts, and then along came Googlemail. To many people, these mail services are not the sort of thing they think of as being suitable for running their business, but as I said, the world is definitely changing and here I spell out the reasons why one of these services has created a real alternative to the old way of doing things.

Googlemail give you flexibility

Here are the reasons why you should seriously consider moving to Googlemail for your business email service:

1. It can be ubiquitous – available everywhere – from your mobile phone, laptop at home or while travelling, business PC, Holiday Hotel PC etc.
2. It can be configured to collect email from your other email accounts – it can act as a universal aggregator of email services. It can also send email from any of your “aliases” – you choose whether you wish to send as a personal email or from one of your other accounts
3. It has a great spam filter
4. It is better at organising your email. Traditionalists (I know a few like this) may have developed a complex system for keeping their email organised – copying mail on different subjects or from different people into different folders. Googlemail allows you to sort mail in a similar manner, but is actually much more powerful. Instead of folders, Googlemail uses “labels” or think of them as Tags. These give you quick access to the mail you once kept in folders – but here is the killer feature – an email can appear in more than one place – just give it two labels (e.g. “Urgent” and “Personal”).
5. Just like Outlook or Outlook Express, Googlemail has automatic features – it can automatically label incoming emails in different ways (or delete all emails from your worst enemy if that is your wish).
6. Googlemail automatically keeps tabs of “conversations” based on subject, replies and forwards.
7. For people who are (like me I admit it) somewhat paranoid and like to keep backups and archives of really old stuff, It is easy to backup and if wished, archive Googlemail emails using IMAP.
8. The Google contacts utility is slowly getting better and better – and many mobile devices (iPhones Android and optionally Windows Mobile)  are now able to use this as a single source address book (no more address books in different formats in different places hoorah). It is easy to import and export to and from the Google Addressbook.

I hope these features persuade you to have a look at Googlemail – I suspect many who try it will find it a liberating and time saving move and will never want to go back.