I don’t know about you, but e-mail has been a frustration for me in my work at church.  Here was my dilemma with respect to e-mail.

  1. We support a local small business and having hosting with them.  But…their spam filtering and web mail interface are below what I found acceptable.
  2. I love the ability to check my e-mail from anywhere via a great web interface, but I don’t feel like I should subject my church to ads in services like Hotmail or Yahoo.  (Really, should I send out an ad for Yahoo Personals?)
  3. I also loved the ease of jamming through a hundred e-mails that a desktop provider gives me.  (But again wanted a good web interface…I wanted it all)
  4. I am cheap!  I did not want to pay for POP access/ad free e-mails via Yahoo or Hotmail.

So after suffering, testing, retesting, and researching I have come to the following solution to my e-mail needs.  Using Gmail with POP access.

Here is what I did and would recommend you thinking about.

  1. I created an account with Gmail. 
  2. I accessed the control panel of my church’s web provider and did two things.  A – turned off my spam filters, and, B – forwarded all e-mail (without leaving any on my local companies server) to my new Gmail account.
  3. I then used Thunderbird to set up POP access to Gmail.  (That basically means I can access it with a desktop e-mail manager.  I used Thunderbird, which is similar to Outlook Express.)  The POP access is quite easy to set up.  If you can read, you can set it up.
  4. I now receive both e-mail from my Gmail account and my church’s account at Gmail.  I send all e-mail through Gmail.
  5. I started using Plaxo.  Plaxo can sync with both Outlook (and Outlook Express) and Thunderbird. That allows me to access my contacts anywhere.  Therefore it is easy to use the web interface at night or on the weekends because I have all my contacts online as well as in my desktop e-mail manager.

Here is why I love this arrangement.

  1. The Spam filtering on Gmail is superior.  Several times a week I would get e-mails from church members blocked as spam.  Sometimes these were important.  Gmail seems less likely to make that mistake.
  2. I set up Gmail in such a way that all of my e-mails will be archived, both incoming and outgoing.  Should my computer ever crash, I still have records of my e-mails.  Gmail has virtually unlimited storage of e-mails.
  3. It allows for the ease of a desktop program with the convenience of a web-mail interface.  (The web mail interface takes a little to get used too.)
  4. Gmail uses Google technology to search your e-mails, both sent and received, on-line.  Therefore you can find that e-mail you are looking for quickly on line.  (Much quicker then the Outlook Express search feature.)
  5. I can quickly scan the e-mails that Gmail has flagged as spam and figure out if I need to let them through or not.  It is much quicker then other interfaces.

A few months back I convinced the children’s ministry director at our church to switch to gmail and after a few weeks she told me, "Gmail is changing my life."

Of course she was saying that tongue and cheek, but she was serious
in realizing that gmail is an amazing e-mail system that will improve
how you communicate with e-mail.