How to have real email

Your company structure is set up and you are ready to reach out to manufacturers and to various other vendors. But being a small business, you want to be take seriously. I am sure getting an email from xyzbusiness@hotmail.com is going to put your request at the bottom of the list. If only you could have professional looking email. Well you can.

After I set up my legal structure, I went to godaddy (or any registrar of your choice) and bought a domain that matches my LLC name. I do not have a server, nor do I want to deal with setting up email through a hosting service, nor would I like to pay for it at this time, given I am trying to bootstrap this business. That is where google comes in.

Google will host your email service, provide typical gmail size mail box, as well as a calendar and google docs (poor but free substitute for office) and do it all at no cost to you. You can now have an email address of myemail@mycompany.com without the hassles of hosting and setting up. You can host up to 50 email addresses with their free service which means you can even set up dummy mail boxes like sales@mycompany.com, HR@mycompany.com, and others. What better way look like a real company.

If your company gets even further, for 50 dollars per user/per year you can get a whopping 25GB mail box size. What I also like about gmail, is it has POP and IMAP support if you want to use outlook. The system walks you through setting it up and I have been quite please so far. Just search for google aps, and look for the standard version.

SO far it has worked well for me. If I find a substitute I will let you know but the ease of this just can't be beat. Anyone else had experience with this?