Ever wondered you can use GMAIL for your corporate emails?

I started using GMAIL a long back. I was amazed not only due to its cool AJAX features but its other features such as quick search, Email tagging (you dont store emails in folders anymore).

One main feature I liked was to have synchronised with email client. Since I frequently travel or work from home, it is vital to have both synchronised all the time. Most of other providers thought to have POP3 access before , but it could only sync incoming emails, not outgoing.

Gmail offers two way synchronization. So if you are using your outlook to receive and send emails, they both can be synchronised with your gmail account. So you have two copies of emails at any given time (incoming & outgoing both).

I wanted to use this to my advantage, but I did not want to use gmail account as my corporate account. I wanted to keep my current email address vinayak@mycorporatedomain.com all the time. After going through all features of gmail, I figured out how to do it. Today I am going to explain how I did it.

1. create & login to your gmail account
2. goto settings>>forwarding & pop3
3. Under pop download section select [] Enable POP only for mail that arrives from now on
4. Set "When messages are accessed with POP " to "keep googlemail's copy in the inbox"
5. Follow instructions on this page to synchronise your email client (outlook etc) with gmail.
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ctx=%67mail&hl=en_GB&answer=12103
It is very vital that step 5 is successful. If you have trouble in it, dont follow further steps.
Change outgoing email address in your Outlook to corporate email address and check if it synchronises with Gmail.
6. In Gmail, visit settings>>Accounts. Add Your corporate email address there. Follow verification process there.
7. Set "When I receive a message sent to one of my addresses:
[]Reply from the same address the message was sent to.
8. If you have more than one corporate email addresses, add all of them here. Dont forget to complete email verification process for all of them.
9. Login to your corporate email address and forward it to your gmail email address. Repeat this step if you added more than one email addresses in Gmail.
10. Delete your corporate emails from your email client (e.g. Outlook) otherwise you will receive two copies of emails.

How it will work?
1. every email sent to your corporate email address will arrive in Gmail. Since your email client(outlook) is synchronised with Gmail account, it should also be downloaded there.
2. When you reply to incoming email within Gmail, it will select email address automatically.
3. When you write new email within Gmail, you can select from which account you are sending the email.
4. When you write email from Outlook, it should display your corporate email address. If not ; follow step 5 properly.

You cannot do this two way sync if your ISP does not allow to use google SMTP server.

Since all emails go through google SMTP, your chances of them landing on other end are high.
Gmail has inbuilt spam filter, so you can keep unwanted emails away.

Besides many other features you have good & powerful addressbook in Gmail. Sadly you can only import / export addressbook gmail from/to outlook. It does not synchronise in real time as it does in case of emails.

Where on earth you get free 2GB space anyways?

If you have any queries please post as comment so everyone else who did not understand it will benefit from it.

Happy emails..