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You are here: Home / Archives for Gmail

My ultimate guide to getting started with Gmail

29-May-2013 by Jodie Miners

So, you have your shiney new Google accounts set up. Now what? Here is some tips and tricks to get you started with Gmail.

Update:

Now, the day after this was published, Gmail went and changed the way you use Gmail. It has taken me a while, but I think I quite like the new Categories feature in Gmail. Thankfully, Lifehacker has a great post – Everything you need to know about Gmail’s new super-confusing layout. Quite aptly titled. Go there first to try and get a handle on Categories before you delve into Labels.

Read more about Getting Started with Gmail

Filed Under: Gmail

Email for Community Groups

19-May-2010 by Jodie Miners

This is the third in a series of posts for Creating a Web Presence for your Community Group. In this post I will take a look at Email for your Community Group. This is a bit of a long post and has a lot of technical details and involved steps, but the good news is that you only ever need to do it once!

Most community groups have a President, a Treasurer and various other committee positions. The main feature of community groups is that the people in these roles change regularly – at least once per year. If you are dealing with suppliers or members of the public, the email communications may get lost when things transfer from the outgoing President to the incoming President. You usually remember to transfer hard copy files, and even maybe soft copy documents, but what about the email history of the group, that is harder.

This is where I will suggest one option only – Google Apps for Your Domain – because it is great, it’s FREE and it works so well for community groups and small businesses (See my previous post on Google Aps for Your Domain for small business).

The Set Up

Here are the steps to getting up and running with GAFYD Email for your community group:

  1. Sign up for Google Apps by choosing the Standard Edition of Google Apps for Your Domain – this is the FREE version.
  2. Enter your domain name and follow the prompts through the setup process. It is quite straightforward. There is a great step by step guide for the whole process.
  3. Now you need to verify that you own the domain you said you did.  For this you go back to your WordPress.com site you previously set up (if you chose not to set up a WordPress.com site see the instructions here).
  4. You will be given a verification code from Google Apps – it starts with google and has a long string of numbers and letters after it.
  5. In WordPress go to Settings, then Domains then click on Edit DNS. Halfway down the page enter your verification code, click on Generate DNS which enters the correct DNS records into the box at the top. Now click the Save DNS Records button.
  6. Now go back into your Google Apps account and click the Verify button to finish the process in the Google Apps control panel. You’ll know when verification is complete by checking the status of your services. Next to Calendar, for example, it will say Active instead of Updating.

Note that it could take up to 48 hours for the verification to apply because it can take that long for the DNS servers to update.

You should now be able to send and receive email from your Google Apps account, with the initial account you set up.

Create the Users

The next step is then to create an email address for each member of your community group. Create generic email addresses such as president@yourdomain.com.au, treasurer@yourdomain.com.au and info@yourdomain.com.au. There is a step by step guide on how to create users in Google Apps. Assign each user a generic, easy to remember password for now.

It will be annoying for your users to keep checking their email from your community group domain, so now you want to forward your email to the individual’s own existing email address. They can do this themselves, or you can do it for them before you let them know about the account you have just created for them. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Log out of the admin of the domain and in to the newly created president@yourdomain.com.au email account. Use the URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au to get to the email.
  2. Follow these steps to set up the forwarding.
  3. Log out of that user, and into the account of the other users and do the same thing.

You may also want to set up a group email called committee@yourdomain.com.au. That way, to email the whole committee, people just need to use the one email address. Follow these steps for setting up groups in your domain.

Sub Domains

The URL of http://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com.au is a pretty long URL to remember and may not be so easy for your committee members. So in this step you will set up some sub domains for each of the Google Apps, apps (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Docs etc). We have not delved into the other apps other than Mail – that will be covered in one of the next posts in the series.

The subdomain for mail will be http://mail.yourdomain.com.au

This is the steps to set up the sub domains.

  1. Log back into WordPress.com and go to Settings then Domains and click on Edit DNS.
  2. In the DNS box enter the following CNAME entries.
  3. CNAME mail ghs.google.com.
    CNAME docs ghs.google.com.
    CNAME sites ghs.google.com.
    CNAME calendar ghs.google.com.
    CNAME contacts ghs.google.com.
  4. Click on the Save DNS Records button.
  5. Now come back into your Google Apps admin, go to Service Settings, and follow these steps to set up the mappings for the sub domains for each app. However, when you are in the page to change the url for Mail, there is a link to “Change URLs for all domain services”. If you click on that link you can do all the sub domain URL’s in one hit.
  6. Now log out of the Admin and test your new subdomain by going to http://mail.yourdomain.com.au (as with other DNS changes it may take up to 48 hours for it to work).

Spread the Word

Now email your committee members and let them know the following:

  • The new email address for their committee position
  • The fact that the emails sent to that address will be coming directly to their own inbox.
  • The general committee email address for sending emails to the whole committee.
  • The URL http://mail.yourdomain.com.au to log into the email
  • The password that you created originally (tell them to change it right away by following these steps).

I would suggest the following rules for using the president, treasurer etc emails. If they are replying to an email sent to president@yourdomaincom.au it is fine to come from their own email address (if you are particular about keeping a full audit trail of communications both ways, then ask them to cc or bcc the president email address in all replies). If they are sending an “official” email on behalf of the group then they should log into the mail account to send the email from there (eg an email out to all members).

Or, if they already use Gmail for their own personal mail, they can use this trick to send your group’s email right from within their own Gmail account and have it come from their yourdomain.com.au email address.

In the next post I will talk about options for managing your members, and communicating with your members.

Filed Under: community, Gmail, Wordpress

Google Apps gets Apps

11-May-2010 by Jodie Miners

Google Apps For Your Domain (GAFYD) now has the Google Apps Marketplace. In my last post on GAFYD, I listed out some of the benefits for using GAFYD in a small business, team or even if you just have your own domain. The Apps Marketplace is yet another compelling reason for small (and even larger) businesses to use GAFYD.

There is an amazing array of Apps to choose from, and so many competing apps, that it actually makes it quite hard to choose – see Project Management Apps for an example. But if there are apps that your businesses has been currently using, you may now be able to integrate them with your GAFYD account. For example, TripIt is one of my favourite online apps (and one of the few that I pay for the premium version of) – it allows me to track and share all my travel details online. With TripIt for GAFYD you can now arrange and share trip information for all members of the team – all with your regular GAFYD login.

The apps in the Apps Marketplace can integrate with GAFYD by having a Single Sign On, Gmail integration, Calendar integration, Docs integration or a combination all of these. Interestingly however, at the time of writing this post, there is only one App that has Gmail integration and that is Jira Studio by Atlassian, and it only has read only Gmail integration, so there must be some difficulty for the apps developers to integrate fully with Gmail.

The easiest way to find apps in the marketplace is to click on the “Search Marketplace” button with no search criteria. Then you can use the search filters to refine the search from there. Alternatively refine the search first by clicking on one of the categories from the home page and then use the refine search criteria to limit the display within that category.

There are many free apps, but mostly they are paid SAAS apps that now just integrate with GAFYD. There is also a very confusing array of  “professional services” which is people trying to sell you support hours for Google Apps and Enterprise Search Apps that are only for large enterprises. I would really like to see the enterprise and service offerings more separate from the Apps and a way of filtering for only the Free apps.

Where the Google Apps Marketplace will be very useful is for small business to integrate some of their other Line of Business apps into GAFYD. Apps like CRM, project management, time tracking, expense reporting and even Accounting (although Saasu is a notable exception at the moment, but they have said they are looking into it).

As more and more apps come into the marketplace it is going to be great for anyone using GAFYD as their business platform.

Filed Under: Gmail, saas

Google Apps for Small Business

11-May-2010 by Jodie Miners

If you have read my blog before you may know that I love Google Apps for Your Domain (GAFYD). GAFYD comes in two flavours Premier and Standard. Premier costs US$50 per person per year and Standard is FREE!. At this stage, for a very small business, I see no compelling reason to pay for GAFYD – just stick with the Standard version. The main things you get with Premium over and above the Standard is additional support, more storage space, the ability to turn off ads in Gmail, Outlook syncing, resource scheduling in Calendar and Google Video.

GAFYD is aimed squarely at businesses currently using Microsoft Outlook and Exchange – they even have a Migration Guide for Exchange administrators. Recently, Google made Gmail a fully fledged Exchange account to enable syncing of Gmail, Google Contacts and Google Calendar to your mobile device very straightforward. For small business, GAFYD is now a compelling choice as an Exchange replacement. There is a great article showing Outlook users how to work with Gmail, as getting used to the threaded conversations can be challenging for some people (but since Outlook 2010 now has threaded conversations, it definitely looks like it is the way to go.

But it does not stop there – the A in GAFYD is Apps. Currently the Google “Apps” are Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites. But soon GAFYD users will get other Google Apps such as Reader, Blogger, Picasa and hopefully even more (No sign of Wave or Google Voice yet for GAFYD – or no sign of Google Voice in Aus yet either). The addition of Blogger and Picasa will be very helpful for small teams as it will enable them to share pictures and have multiple people blog from the one account.

The benefit of Google Docs for most small businesses or teams does not need a lot of explaining – documents backed up, central location, real time collaboration and editing of documents, instant sharing etc. Now you can upload any files, not just documents to Google Docs, and there are a heap of new features that make it really very useful.

For me, I struggle to use Google Docs for absolutely everything – especially spreadsheets and printed documents. As an Excel expert, there are some limitations with Google Spreadsheet that just make it too hard to use, and whilst I will happily create a draft document or collaborate on a draft in Google Docs, if I want to print it, I will use Word – just to get the fine grained control. There is a product called OffiSync that allows you to open documents on Google Docs with Office, but I have not tried it yet.

The benefit of using Google Sites for small business and teams is probably not that apparent yet, and frankly it has quite a long way to go to be really a fantastic product for day to day office productivity. Google Sites came out of the purchase of a great product called JotSpot, which was then weakened down to what we now have in Sites. It’s meant to be a bit of everything. It can be an externally facing website, an internally facing Intranet, a Wiki, a Blog and a collaboration platform. There is a good overview video of it’s functionality.

As I loved the old Google Pages, Google Sites is a really poor cousin and I would not recommend it for an externally facing website, but it could be good as an Intranet or small internal Wiki.

So overall GAFYD is a must for small businesses, and even just one person with a domain, like me – yes jodiem.com.au runs GAFYD! Hopefully soon, I will be able to ditch my Gmail account as my primary account and be able to use my GAFYD account to use for all Google services.

Filed Under: Gmail

Swtiching to Android – Gmail Contacts

14-Jan-2010 by Jodie Miners

This is my first post about switching to Android for my primary phone. Whilst there are things I love about the iPhone, I just HATE the way it works with Gmail and I want the Android phone specifically for it’s gmail integration. The first thing I have to do, however is import my contacts into Gmail… and so the fun begins.

Last Christmas (2008), whilst working on my Mum’s computer I accidentally deleted her whole Outlook contacts list – 400+ contacts. As she was moving to Gmail anyway we decided to rebuild the contacts list from old backups and import them into Gmail. Well long story short, it took me about 3 days and I ended up having to manually edit all of the 400 contacts to get them to appear correctly in Gmail.

When Gmail when out of Beta in 2009 I could not believe it – how could they take it out of Beta when the contacts support was sooo bad! But, here I am and now I have to use Gmail for Contacts. My Mum loves having all her contacts in Gmail now and I can see the benefit.

My contacts were a complete mess… I had:

  • 1300+ email addresses in Gmail, of which probably 200 are of any value.
  • A very old outlook file with contacts that are probably mostly irrelevant
  • 250 or so contacts from my phone that have shortcuts for names (generally only Initials or @twitter names) and the barest of minimum info like Mobile number only.
  • My Mum’s family contact list from her Gmail, which I would like to have the contacts from
  • My Gmail contacts are in a complete mess – some have names, some done.
  • Some people could be in all 3 lists, and some could be in just one… it’s a mess.
  • My phone also includes non people data such as bank accounts, ABN numbers etc – which I like to have handy in my phone at all times

A quick Google search on importing Contacts into Gmail says it’s easy – it’s just a few steps – export your CSV file from outlook, and Import into Gmail. But my past experience is that the fields just don’t match up.  But Reading posts about things not going well does not fill me with confidence, and I agree with that post. Google needs to provide the definitive CSV list that will import 100% of data 100% of time. Outlook does a perfectly acceptable job of importing contacts, so why cant Google.

I found a great post last year with a guide to the full Google Contacts CSV file and another post that reveals the trick to importing Gmail Addresses by switching to the Old Version of Google Contacts (which is what I had to do last year). Thankfully, however, Gmail has improved a bit and I will NOT recommend using the Old Version trick as there are just too many issues with it not labelling details correctly.  Gmail now has a great tool for finding Duplicate contacts, which really does help, but it is still not good enough!

(Note: I manually cleaned up all my contact lists in Excel but I think the Gmail duplicates would have done a great job of cleaning up my duplicates, but I wanted to do a really thorough clean-up).

So eventually I did get my 420 (yes, that’s all after the clean-up) contacts into Gmail. I had huuuge dramas getting them in there, and tried reading every post about the terrible “Oops. An unknown error occured while importing your contacts” message to no avail, as it seems that everyone’s issues were different. But here is a quick guide to getting it right, I hope:

  • Use the full CSV File – See my version of the full CSV file, including notes on which fields to use
  • Save as the DOS CSV file format
  • Delete Suggested Contacts*
  • Delete All Contacts*
  • Delete any commas in the CSV file*
  • Delete any reference to your email address in the CSV file*
  • Ensure there are no non-blank cells in the CSV file!

* Whilst I can’t vouch for the accuracy of these fixes, for me it was the non-blank cells issue. Here’s how I fixed it. Select all the cells in your spreadsheet, hit F5 then click on Special…, choose Blanks. This selects all blank cells in your worksheet. Colour those selected cells any colour. Now go through your sheet cell by cell looking for any white cells that have no text in them. Click on that cell and hit the delete key, deleting the contents of that cell. Repeat this process by re-selecting and re-colouring until you are 100% sure there are no non-blank cells.

Oh and I did delete all my contacts – all 1300 of them that were in Gmail originally, but I’m now not convinced that was necessary (and I forgot to take a backup, so it was an enforced cleanup of my contacts in a way).

So if this long winded post helps at least one other person save a few hours of frustration, then it will be worth it. But Google really really really need to get their act together. Surely they could have an error message that tells you which contact it failed on, why it failed, and then import the others. Without this fix Gmail contacts is still completely crap and not worth dealing with unless you really really have to (or really really want an Android).

Update: As @trib just very rightly pointed out, if all I wanted to do was switch my already super organised contacts over from the iPhone (or any other device) into Gmail, then there are a number of Google Sync tools that may help. These did not help me because my contacts were in such a mess.

Filed Under: Android, Gmail, phones

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