# General Business Category > Technology Forum >  emails accounts

## murdock

what email account do you have and why?

i having been thinking about my email accounts...the problem i have is every time i move like from mweb to telkom or to where ever next i have to change my email address and i dont always have access...

so i have to keep sending change of email address.

is it not better just to have an email account with google...gmail...which i have had the longest and i can access it from anywhere?

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## IanF

I would register a domain like murdock.co.za and use that for email. Gmail is what I use for personal account and it is great when you change ISPs. For business it does make you look a bit iffy.

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## Neville Bailey

I use web-based gmail exclusively, for both personal and business purposes.

It has advanced (and still is) over the years and can be used very professionally for business purposes.

I have about 6 different email addresses that I route through my single gmail account, and none of my email contacts are any the wiser that I am using gmail in the background.

Until recently it was a bit tacky, in the sense that recipients would see my email address as "Neville Bailey [neville@accountingsoftwaresupport.co.za on behalf of nvll.bl@gmail.com]", particularly if the recipient was using Outlook 2003 or later. It is now possible to bypass gmail's outgoing server and substitute it with your own smtp server - I use the mailhop smtp service.

It is also possible to use HTML in gmail signatures, which was not possible until recently.

When my Outlook *.pst file started getting corrupt as few years ago, I made the move to gmail and I haven't looked back.

My BlackBerry has Google Sync installed, which allows seamless OTA 2-way syncing between my BB and gmail, in terms of contacts and calendar items. I can even accept meeting requests from an Outlook user and update my gmail calendar.

When my laptop was stolen 2 years ago, I was able to access all my emails, via my BB, including emails from a few years back, because everything was stored on gmail!

I would definitely recommend gmail to anyone!  :Smile:

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AndyD (10-Jan-11), Dave A (10-Jan-11), Nefie (17-Jan-11)

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## Martinco

I fully agree on the Gmail option.  I have also been using this "backup" system for some years and works well.

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## AmithS

If you register a domain for your own email, does this then belong to you? and you can take it to anyone to run for you ? 

How does it work & what are the costs like?

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## AndyD

> If you register a domain for your own email, does this then belong to you? and you can take it to anyone to run for you ? 
> 
> How does it work & what are the costs like?


Once you've registered your domain it belongs to you as long as you pay for it each year. You can host with any ISP you choose. Yearly registration costs about a hundred bucks or less from what I remember. Hosting is dependant on your website if you have one and how many email address. This is entirely negotiable with your ISP.

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## irneb

You could even get the same through Google: http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/domain.html

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## xolitech

I have setup similar to Neville's and it works very well for me, it serves as a multiple backup systems.

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## Nefie

Cannot agree more with Neville.
Besides the email, Gmail gives you the calendar, docs and more.
And then, when I moved from my Nokia E71 to Samsung Galaxy, I did not even need a PC suite of some sort. I just Synchronised my Nokia with Google, moved the SIM and again Synchronised the Galaxy with Google. And all my contacts, calendar, mail was there. Its awsome.

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## AmithS

So a quick question for the guys using Gmail as a primary or routing\backup system?

Do you use an email client like Outlook or do you just use the Gmail Website as your client?

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## Neville Bailey

I only use the web-based version of Gmail, so I have access to all my emails wherever I might be, even if I don't have my computer with me - all I need is any computer with internet access or my BlackBerry's browser. 

I love the idea of not being tethered to any one computer or device. 

_Posted from my BlackBerry using BerryBlab_

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## AndyD

You can set up gmail with IMAP access so you get your mail on your gmail account and on your Outlook mail system which would give you the best of both worlds if you use mobile as well as normal pc mail..

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## Dave A

I've had hassles in the past with an IMAP account in Outlook. Thanks to our marvelous "world class" (dream on JZ) internet in SA, I had major timeout issues which resulted in the occasional lockup of Outlook.

It was a while ago though - have things improved since?

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## irneb

As stated you can connect to GMail through IMAP ... though I'm in agreement that it's slow in SA. Each time you want to read an email it wants to download it again from the server (even if you have it setup to save a local copy). I personally prefer Thunderbird instead of Outlook (it seems to work slightly better with IMAP). You can use POP3 access to gmail, which would alleviate the speed issues (even in OL) since it makes one single copy on your local HDD.

If you have gmail setup correctly (as the defaults already should be) then using POP3 does not delete the mails from the server, thus you can still open them in the web client / through your phone - even though you've downloaded them to your PC already. The only problem I have with POP3 is the opposite: if I want to delete an email from the server, I then have to open the web client. With IMAP I can delete it straight in Thunderbird (or even move it into different "folders" - which are actually GMail's labels).

For me I also work on several PCs throughout the day, but my emails sometimes are a bit large, not to mention I don't just do emailing - so I've installed Thunderbird Portable on a USB external HDD. That can be started from any Win-PC. Then I also have TB in Linux mapped to that folder so it shares the same data. That way I simply need to take the external HDD with me (which has a lot more than just my emails) and plug it into whatever PC is available.

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## AmithS

Hi Neville,

Did you manage to setup your own SMTP sending server for Vodamail ?

Thanks,

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## Neville Bailey

> Hi Neville,
> 
> Did you manage to setup your own SMTP sending server for Vodamail ?
> 
> Thanks,


Yes, instead of using Gmail as my sending server, I subscribe to the MailHop Outbound Relay service from http://www.dyndns.com. Costs me $19.95 a year.

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## Upstairs

I find gmail works well for all my business needs. With Google talk one can save on call costs, upload a document both parties can see and through gmail get mail from all my other accounts in one place. It does happen that some of my mails are dumped to the trashcan by some corporates, but if you inform your clients to put you on their white list all works well. Soon the likes of Outlook will be gone. My prediction.

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## irneb

Unfortunately for me there is literally 1000's of contacts I'd have to ask to whitelist my gmail address. I prefer using my gmail only for these types of things (such as forum registration). For my business stuff I'm using an address with my company's url - so it also "seems" a lot more professional.


> ... Soon the likes of Outlook will be gone. My prediction.


I'm in agreement, OL is IMO one of the worst email clients I've used. And that includes web based clients.

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## Neville Bailey

> For my business stuff I'm using an address with my company's url - so it also "seems" a lot more professional.


Even though I use web-based Gmail exclusively, I have various alias email addresses riding on top of my Gmail account, including my business domain name, so there's no unprofessionality in my case. In fact, very few of my contacts are even aware that I use Gmail!

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## irneb

> Even though I use web-based Gmail exclusively, I have various alias email addresses riding on top of my Gmail account, including my business domain name, so there's no unprofessionality in my case. In fact, very few of my contacts are even aware that I use Gmail!


That's the other solution yes! I just have a completely separate email account for my business, and not working it through gmail - I'd have to have gone for a paid gmail account since the business emails for the past 12 months is already running at 4GB on that account (it's mainly due to sending & receiving attachments - documents, drawings, PDFs, etc.). Thus my 5GB limit on gmail would quickly be used up.

And due to the enormous volume of emails OL was falling down on me (the major reason I hate it so much). I'm using Thunderbird instead, yet still splitting my emails into separate folders. E.g. one of my folders contain 2374 emails and the size on disk is 1.3GB (all folders together 12.4 GB ). Opens fine in TB without waiting for it (searches quick as well), in OL a folder of just 500 emails with the PST file in a size of 3GB was just hanging for hours - I either needed to make PST files galore (to split it to under 2GB each) or move to something which uses a decent file system (i.e. TB where each folder is one file).

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## Neville Bailey

In fact, the Gmail limit is over 7GB!

_Posted from my BlackBerry using BerryBlab_

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## wynn

Peter Carruthers is running a number of mini seminars on various topics, one of which will be on gmail and how powerfull it is.
If you are not a member of 'Petes weekly' better join now, it's free.

http://petesweekly.com/

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## irneb

Just a bit more news on GMail: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02...eletion_snafu/
OK, so it's only 0.08% of GMail's users - i.e. about 150000 people have all their mail wiped out. Maybe Google will get it back for them, but this shows one of the possible problems using a cloud-based email service.

As stated before, I'm happy with my gmail account for personal mail. For my business stuff I prefer having a more localized version where I don't rely on some external party to keep my mails for me. Actually even my gmail is kept locally as a local cached copy in my Thunderbird's email folders - which means I can see all previously downloaded mail even off-line. So even if this happened to me, I'd at least have been able to re-instate my mails (not that I'd have liked to use my bandwidth to upload them to gmail though).

Point here is (as always) ... backup ... backup ... backup ... and then if still in doubt ... backup again ... no matter what email service provider / program you have! Few remember that emails need to be backed up as well, and unfortunately most backup systems only backup files - so most email client programs have issues with backups. E.g.: Say you have Outlook. Your mail is contained inside one single file (per account usually) - which can be an enormous file. If you have your backup system store that file, you have a backup of all your mail. The next time the backup system does its thing it needs to re-copy that entire file again (even if there was only one single mail added). Further, say you've accidentally erased a message a week or so ago - only realizing your mistake now. So you restore the backup from last week ... oops, BIG MISTAKE, you've just lost all other messages since last week's backup. Now while Thunderbird "slightly" alleviates this, you're still stuck with the same issues - only now per folder instead of per account.

One way we use for our business mails is to have a local IMAP server onto which you drag any project related mails. This server then gets backed up at the same time as our normal file server does. Depending in the IMAP server software it can save each message as a single MSG/EML file - thus you can restore one message only (instead of an entire folder / account). You can install a small IMAP server on your own PC (no need for an elaborate network) - but it's going to take some savvy to have it work perfectly for you (i.e. no need to drag your mails to it).

An alternative way I use for my own personal mail backup is to save the messages to EML files from Thunderbird (using the Import/Export Message addon). Unfortunately this is only manual (so I have to remember to do it otherwise I have no backup) - it would have been wonderful if it did this automatically ... or even more wonderful if you could use a decent email client which uses EML files directly instead of some arb PST / MBox / etc. file conglomerations. I know Outlook can save messages in a MSG file format, but can't remember if you can save an entire folder at once, and AFAIK it's also still a manual task.

Or perhaps you can get hold of a backup system which can backup/restore mails direct in the PST/MBox files without needing to first export them, though I haven't seen many of those.

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## Perform Computers

If anyone would like me to code a backup program for them, give me a shout. It'll be a desktop icon where you simply double click and it backs up whatever to wherever.

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## irneb

> If anyone would like me to code a backup program for them, give me a shout. It'll be a desktop icon where you simply double click and it backs up whatever to wherever.


 Would this backup the mails inside the PST files from Outlook instead of simply copying the entire PST file like all other backup systems I've seen?

The major problem is the user needs the ability to restore one single EMAIL without needing to wangle some weird way of opening a duplicate PST file and then dragging the email from there. This would usually also not work since most backup system would have a restore function which would "restore" the old PST file (overwriting the current one). That's fine for restoring a crashed hard-drive when the entire PST file is corrupt / blank, but not for lost / accidentally deleted data!

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