March 2007
Greetings,
Welcome to Circle Talk from New Circle Consulting. It is our goal to bring you industry tips, news & great ideas which you may find helpful to your business.
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- Knowledge Sharing: Gmail - what, why and how
- Quick Tips: SEO Do-it-Yourself (at least, Check-it Yourself)
- Case Study: Coachella Community Website - Communication between two individual websites
Gmail is a Google-owned, web-based email service that includes over 2 gigabytes of storage (and growing).
What is so great about Gmail?
Compared with POP3/Outlook combination, Gmail is web-based and offers you the flexibility of checking your email from any computer with Internet connection.
Compared with other web-based email systems, Gmail has several nice features:
- Conversations
Google groups emails and their replies in your inbox within single "conversations." Clicking on a single conversation will open up the history: email replies back and forth, forwards, etc. - Spam filtering
Gmail is quite successful at preventing spam, with a typical ratio of 95% filtered spam, and 1% spam-filtered normal mail. [source: http://blog.outer-court.com/gmail-faq.html] - Virus Protection
Google also offers virus filtering. You cannot turn this service off, and it prevents you from sending an executable file as an attachment. This limits some of what you can do with a Gmail account, but it probably prevents more mischief than it causes. - Search
Needless to say, Gmail carries over the wonderful search capability Google is famous for. You don't really need to organize your email into folders if you don't want to ... a simple search can find you what you need in most cases. Or you can rely on Labels, a non-exclusive system similar to tags. - Star
Similar to the little flag in Outlook, in Gmail you can put a "Star" on your message. For example, you can use the stars to highlight items needing action.
What do I do with my existing email addresses?
You can still keep your same email address. Simply create a Gmail account and have all of your email forwarded from your existing accounts into your new Gmail account.
Gmail allows you to add multiple email accounts and choose to reply to an email using the address it was sent to. For example, I receive all emails sent to lin@newcircleconsulting.com in my Gmail account. When I reply, the email is shown to be sent from newcircle@gmail.com on behalf of lin@newcircleconsulting.com. This way, people who are familiar with your email address can still recognize where the email is from.
Need more reasons to switch?
Different people find different ways to use Gmail. To me, Gmail also serves as a file storage system. Documents sent back and forth as email attachments now are also accessible from any computer. I can download, and then work on a project when I find a few minutes, wherever I am.
What's Next?
To sign up or learn more about Gmail, visit:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/about.html
