More details here – http://www.google.com/a

Reply from a client looking at one of my listings……

One thing that concerns me is dealing with someone who uses a “gmail”
address for business purposes. Many people would not even reply to a gmail
address not to mention deal with someone who does not use a professional
email address. I am one of them. Gmail unacceptable for business use.

Don’t you have a responsibility to the people you represent and who have
put their homes in your hands to sell. I would be devastated if I found
out the agent I listed my property with was using gmail for business
purposes. I feel that you are doing your clients a huge and serious
injustice by using gmail. As a result, your properties are not likely
getting the attention they should and would if you gave your business a
professional email address.

When you get a professinal email address, please let me know and I will
follow up with my further questions on the Brentwood Bay property.

Thanks,
Annette

Here’s an article for your interest and worth your serious consideration.

GMail is not a business tool. Period.
February 27th, 2011
Something I’ve been seeing more and more is the use of GMail for business.
The problem is, GMail is absolutely unacceptable for business usage, but
the folks who use it don’t see it that way. To be honest, I’ve never used
GMail personally. But GMail’s handling of business scenarios is so poor, I
don’t have to use it to know that it is not the right tool for the job. I
just need to send and receive email from GMail users.

I understand why people like GMail. The UI seems to be good. It can act as
a single collection point for a dozen other accounts and let you work with
them. It hooks up easily to a variety of smartphones. Android phones in
particular work much better with GMail than they do with Exchange, that’s
for sure. And for the consumer level user, these are all excellent reasons
to make GMail your primary email client and account.

But business users have different needs and different use cases, and in
those situations, GMail not only falls flat, it can be outright harmful to
both your ability to work and your appearance as a professional.

Problem #1: Over-aggressive spam filtering

This seems to have gotten better, but I still get reports on a regular
basis that my emails have not come through. Quite frankly, this is not
acceptable. The email account I use for much of my business has been
established for over 10 years. I don’t understand how a GMail user can
send me an email, I respond to it, and somehow my response ends up in
their junk mail bin. This happens with startling frequency. Isn’t GMail
smart enough to figure out that a response to an existing email is ALWAYS
legit, regardless of content? And can’t GMail figure out that since
hundreds of its users reply to emails that I’ve sent, from the same SMTP
server with the same IP address (at least 6 or 7 years now!), that I
should be considered golden? The tendency to filter spam out incorrectly
may be fine for personal use, but in business where dollars are on the
line, it is not acceptable.

Problem #2: “… sent on behalf of…”

GMail as an inbox collator makes perfect sense, until the recipient sees
“… sent on behalf of …” in their email client. It is insanely
unprofessional, particularly when the base address is nowhere near
business-acceptable. If you can’t understand what the issue is… well, I
hope you don’t have to communicate much with customers! When people see
this kind of thing, it doesn’t convey a good image.

Problem #3: Fixing “… sent on behalf of …”

To be fair, the previous problem should be easily solved. All you need to
do is set up GMail to send through the SMTP server proved for the actual
account, in theory. In practice, this does not seem to be too easy. I’ve
set a couple of different people up with standard POP3/SMTP accounts for
my company, and all of the ones who try using GMail to pick up the email
have problems. The standard email client users do not. I thought it was
the mail server, so with a great headache, I moved from a self-hosted
email server to a third-party email server. The problems persist. I have
lost close to ten hours of my life trying to get GMail users able to get
their email and send it out without the stupid “… sent on behalf of …”
message. Meanwhile, I have critical features in my flagship product
undeveloped, and important contracts in the works. Guess what adds money
to my pocket? Guess what doesn’t? Why am I wasting my time because GMail
can’t do what a copy of Outlook Express that shipped with Windows 98 can
do?

Problem #4: Calendars

GMail includes some calendar functionality. It’s even nice enough to
cooperate with the way Outlook and Exchange work. Sadly, it has one
insanely critical flaw: in a common situation, it refuses to send
invitations where you ask them to go. You see, Google accounts allow you
to assign a backup email address. This is a useful idea; it is for
situations like the need to send a password reset to a customer. Google,
in their infinite “wisdom”, decided that if a GMail user sends an
invitation to one of these backup addresses, it should really send it to
the GMail account instead. This means that if I have a personal GMail
account, it is now exposed to someone else who I might not want to have or
see that address. It also means that if I don’t use that GMail account,
I’ll never see the invitation. I’ve missed and almost missed a number of
meetings in the last few months because a GMail user sent the invite to my
address and it ended up in my GMail account.

In summary, GMail is a fine product, but its fit and finish, as well as
some design decisions, make it totally inappropriate for business use.
Your mileage may vary, of course. But from where I sit, as someone who
interacts with GMail users on a regular basis, it has no business in a
business environment.
– Show quoted text –
> *Vancouver Island*
> **
> *
> *
>

Reply
Forward