Gmail is not just Mail

Gmail is not just the most powerful, feature-rich email service available; it also offers a whole host of essential cloud-based services to store your data and make it accessible to all of your devices.

Gmail is:

• Mail
• Contacts
• Tasks
• Calendar
• Docs

Plus, having a Google account gives you access to all of Google’s other services such as Google+, Picasaweb Photo Storage and a personalized iGoogle start page (more about those in a later post)…just to name a few.

The best thing about Gmail, however, is that it offers you nearly 8GB of storage for free for all of your mail on the cloud!  That means that you will not have to constantly delete emails to keep your inbox clean and under an unreasonable quota limit.

Gmail also syncs to all of your devices….read, delete or reply to a message on one device, and it shows as read, deleted or replied on all of your devices.  Add a contact on your iPhone, and that contact immediately appears on your iPad, your laptop and your desktop!  Make an appointment on your Android phone and you will see your updated calendar on any web-enabled device you own!

Gone are the days when we have to say….”Oh, that’s on my computer at home”, or “I don’t have my calendar with me”.  Never again will we forget a number or an email address because we forgot to sync our devices.  Now, enter anything on one and it’s magically there on all!

I’m sure you already have an email address that you’ve probably had for years and don’t want to switch over to a new one……Gmail has a solution for that! You have the ability to plug up to 5 other accounts into Gmail; plus, you can even decide how you would like Gmail to reply to messages that are forwarded into Gmail.  Even if a message is forwarded into to Gmail from another account, you can still reply back to the send from the address to which it was sent even though the message came in and out of Gmail. If, however, you would like to ween yourself off of an old email address, you can make your new Gmail address the default reply-from address so your contacts will know your new address and update their records.

I will post more useful tips and tricks for Gmail and Google services soon, but in the meantime if you have any questions or would like help getting set up with a Gmail account and adding it to your devices, let me know!

-Scott Prince

Prince Consulting

scott@princeconsulting.net