17 Jan2011
A Professional-looking Personal E-mail Address with Gmail Benefits
In addition to e-mail overload, I’ve been diagnosed with e-mail address overload syndrome. People usually say “whoa!” with their mouths wide open when I tell them that I have five e-mail addresses. Of the e-mail addresses I currently use, I created my first with Hotmail many years ago. Shortly afterwards, I tried Yahoo. A few years later, I created one with Gmail. After I add my work and school e-mail addresses to those, I’ve got five that I use somewhat regularly. Recently, I created yet another e-mail address, adding to my misery. This one, though, is different. When I bought my domain (dustinwheelercpa.com), I thought it would be really, really cool to have an e-mail address with that domain. I won’t type it out here for the spam bots to harvest, but for you humans out there, it’s (my first name) @ (my domain). That’s easy to remember, isn’t it? It’s definitely easier for other people to remember than my Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail addresses, which contained a cryptic combination of letters and numbers. Also, people might check out my blog out of curiosity when they see my domain at the end of my e-mail address. The reason why I haven’t done this sooner is that I haven’t liked the webmail interfaces from a few web hosting providers I have tried. Gmail has been my favorite interface among the e-mail addresses that I use, so I set up my domain with Google Apps Standard. With Google Apps, I have my e-mail hosted by Google’s servers with the features of Gmail and also can use Google Calendar and Google Docs with my domain. Since Google Apps Standard is free, it can be a good alternative to an Exchange server for small bootstrapping business. Google has an easy setup guide which took me less than an hour to complete. The guide kept referring to me setting up Google Apps for my “organization,” which seemed funny since my domain is just a blog, not an organization. In the process, though, I discovered how easy it would be for an organization such as a business or non-profit entity to get started with Google Apps. The only mildly brain-racking part was configuring the MX records on my webhost’s control panel, which I figured out thanks to Google’s instructions. Now I have a professional-looking personal e-mail address with the Gmail interface and my data is where I like it – on the cloud.