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When I was an IT Director, my organization had an Exchange server. Staff used Outlook to work on their email, but they could also access the same email on the Exchange server over the web. When I left, I set up email for my business, using what is called a "POP3" account. I can access my email via the web until I open Outlook. Once Outlook sucks the mail down from the email server, it is no longer available via the web. This can be inconvenient if I need to get an old email away from my office. Well, I have now moved my business account to Google mail and I can once again access all my mail via Outlook or over the Web.. Let me tell you how.
The process of moving was actually easier than I expected. I signed up for a Google mail account ($50 a year per user, in my case 1). For that I get 25 GB -- yes gigabytes -- of email storage. (By contrast, when I was IT Director, our users had 100 MB mailboxes). Google mail also includes the Postini email security service that filters out spam, viruses, and other malicious emails.
I chose to synchronize my Outlook email with my Google mail. This would create the same sitution I had at my previous job: My email will stay on the server. New mail will show up in Outlook. Mail that I delete from Outlook or move from the Inbox to some other folder, is immediately deleted or moved on the server. To set up synchronization, I downloaded a small program from Google that would do the job and ran it. Well, the program ran, and ran, and ran. I have a very large mailbox with lots of folders and subfolders. It actually took several hours to complete the synchronization, but in the end, what was on my computer matched what was on the server.
In the process, the Google app actually created a new mail folder in Outlook, "Google Maill --
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." At that point, I had two folders -- my original mail folder, "Personal Folder," and the Google Mail folder. I was happy about that because it meant that no changss had been made to my original mail. I expected that, but I have had enough experiences where things did not work out as expected, that I was still relieved. Oh, and yes, I did have a backup of my mail folder in case things went awry.
There were a couple of issues. I noticed one right away. Some of my mailbox folders were moved inside other folders where they did not belong. That was puzzling, but I dragged the misplaced Outlook folders to where they belonged. The problem was fixed almost instantly. I verified this by accessing the Google mail server via a web browser -- everything was as it should be.
I also found that when I started Outlook, it asked me which profile I wanted to use. Since you can have multiple email accounts with multiple email providers, you have one profile that contains information, like the address of your email server and your password, for each account. This is your profile. (You can see them if yo open up Control Panel and click on the Mail applet and then on the "Show Profiles" button. If you have more than one email account, you will see one profile for each account.) I set my Google mail profile as the default and the message at Outlook start-up went away.
One of the immediate effects of my changeover was that virtually all of my spam disappeared. I have my Outlook spam settings on high, so spam that succeeds in getting into my computer is usually shunted to the Junk email folder. Also, like my previous email provider, Google uses Postini to filter out spam and other malicious email. Until now, I have received a daily email from Postini summarizing the spam that it catches. it is important to review both the Junk Email lists and the external spam lists periodically because some good mail can look like spam and get diverted. But when I moved to Google mail I stopped getting that daily email. They are working on that.
The other oddity that I'm working on is that all my appointments are showing up as five hours later than they should. For example, an 8:00 AM appointment is showing as occurring at 1:00 PM. Now, when I set up my account I set my time at -5 hours behind Greenwich Mean Time (I know, it's no longer called that). However, it looks like it didn't "take." (Yes, it's weird to hear an IT guy talk like that, but what can I say.) So, I'm still working on that as well.
If you need to have your email on your local computer and to be able to access it via the web, this is a great solution. I will be moving the two clients I wrote about some time ago to Google mail in the next month of so: One has a small shop and Exchange is overkill. The other is using regular email, but actually needs the extras that Exchange provides. Google mail will give each just what is needed.
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