So you’re an Outlook, MacMail, or Entourage user and you are struggling with how to deal with email at home or when you are out of the office traveling. Yes you might have webmail tied to your hosting platform but does it have spam and virus filtering built in?

What if your hosting providers server blows up? They all do at some point due to a spam attack or other act of god. What do you do for back up? Can you get mail elsewhere? Send mail?

The answer is state of the art, reliable, professional and free. It’s called Gmail (Google’s email). Set yourself up in 3 easy steps:

1. If you don’t have an account do your self a favor and head on over to gmail.com and sign up.
2. Then tell your webmaster to mirror all your email to your Gmail account. This means every piece of mail you receive will still end up in your Outlook AND a copy will be sent to your Gmail account.
   When you go home or hit the road and don’t want to lug your laptop you can access your mail from your Gmail.com account
3. Professional ninja technique: set up your default ’send as’ as your main email address. So when you send an email from Gmail the recipient will see that it came from you@yourbusiness.com, NOT Gmail. You can do this under ‘Settings’ and ask your webmaster for help if needed.

So to wrap it up you can have your desktop Outlook to get all your email and have a webmail backup with spam an virus protection when you need it. In fact you might like Gmail so much you might just dump Outlook like I did

Feel free to comment!