Starting a new business or trying to organise your old business comes with a million tiny administrative tasks that you didn’t even know you needed to care about.

Enter email...it’s the definitive tool for a 21st Century business and a ‘must have’ but the ‘how’ can be daunting.

What service to use?

That’s a tricky one but the helpful folk at Top Ten reviews spent 120 hours testing 16 free email services and have produced this useful breakdown.

https://www.toptenreviews.com/services/internet/best-free-email-services/

Gmail comes out on top, that’s what we use at Kindleman and what we recommend for clients.  It’s easy to set up and troubleshoot.

We like it because...

  • best spam filtration
  • Great UI 
  • Organise email into folders
  • mark with labels
  • built in chat & video
  • Good search features
  • Comes with storage (From 1 TB)
  • Google Docs integration 

Gmail

Choosing an email address

Gmail is a great provider and a gmail address is fine for your personal email but with all the spam flying around these days, a business email needs to include the business as the domain name  xx@mybusinessname.com.au.  

Google make it relatively easy to set up a Gmail account with a custom domain (approx US$12/year) via their sign up interface.

Here’s a helpful article by Kathy Li. It goes something like this - https://medium.com/buildbuilds/how-to-hook-up-a-custom-domain-email-to-your-free-gmail-account-ead660884d11

Alternatively you can purchase your domain through your own provider e.g. Crazy Domains, Go Daddy etc etc. Many domain registrations come with email included but the webmail interfaces can be clunky and people like to use what they know, so back to Gmail.

You can set up your custom domain in Gmail. The Digital Nonprofit have provided a useful cheat sheet - https://www.thedigitalnonprofit.com/blog/use-gmail-own-domain-free

Consider setting up general email addresses as well as individual email addresses e.g. info@ accounts@ or sales@. These can then be set up as groups to distribute to a number of people.

Migrating Email

You already have a business but you need to change providers or clients and you need to migrate your emails...this gives me a rash just thinking about it but maybe it’s not so bad.

Google have a data migration service which sounds amazing! https://support.google.com/a/answer/6351474?hl=en

Hosting provider Media Temple have also provided a good solution using IMAP. Seems simple enough...

https://mediatemple.net/community/products/dv/204405444/how-do-i-migrate-email-between-servers-using-imap

Microsoft also have a migration service to Office 365 - handy!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/mailbox-migration/mailbox-migration


That’s one small thing off your list.