With the arrival of Gmail’s new offline access, the last barrier to relying totally upon webmail has fallen. Have you made the switch yet?

“I can’t switch to Gmail. My company email uses its own domain name, so I can’t suddenly start using my.name@gmail.com!”

You’re right: every self-respecting small business these days has its own domain name, and it’s probably printed on your business cards and other correspondence.

The good news is that Google Apps, a suite of business tools from Google, lets you use Gmail with your own domain name. There are also versions for schools, non-profits, and ISPs. To get started, here’s a wonderful beginner’s guide to using Google Apps email for your domain that you can either step through yourself, or pass along to your company’s IT peeps.

So why switch to Google’s Gmail?

Gmail has many features to recommend it, but easily the #1 reason to switch is that Gmail has 99.9% solved the spam problem. I am baffled as to why this goes so oft-unremarked, because it really is quite remarkable: with very infrequent exceptions, Gmail accounts just simply don’t get spam anymore.¹

Other Gmail features include:

• Superb mobile phone support
• Free IM, voice and video chat integration
• SMTP/POP support for legacy Outlook (etc) users
• Customized themes
• Send text messages to cell phones
• Canned responses to save reply time
• Keyboard shortcuts for ninja-like navigation speed
• Integration with Google Calendar (and Google Docs)
• Inbox filters, vacation autoresponders, and everything else you’ve come to expect from modern email programs.

For more advanced users, using Gmail in conjunction with Google Chrome allows it to essentially become its own standalone application, separate from your Web browsing tabs. More on how to do that another day…

Catch the Web 2.0 Wave

Email is often the crucial digital lifeline for our organizations, and it’s understandable why we’re often reluctant to switch to webmail. It’s a switch that’s eventually going to happen, though. As explained in this recent piece about Gmail achieving superiority over Outlook (emphasis added):

There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else). Over the last few years, we’ve seen many programs shifting from the first category to the second—now you can get spreadsheets and photo editors online, though they’re still not as good as programs hosted on your computer.

But e-mail has crossed the line completely. Hosted services like Gmail are now the most powerful and convenient way to grapple with a daily onslaught of mail. If you’re still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac’s Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you’re doing it wrong.

This is what Web 2.0 means, in part: software that’s no longer tied to your local hard drive (see this definition of Web 2.0 for a longer explanation).

Now that the online/offline issue has been licked, Gmail’s last real limitation is its 20mb attachment limit—way too small for modern times. Thankfully, this looks like it will be addressed with the imminent release of the Google Web Drive (or GDrive). Into the cloud, full steam ahead!

1. I even know some people who auto-forward their existing email addresses to a Gmail account before re-downloading them, using Google’s amazing spam filters to “launder” their email account. [↩]